All the Kids Have Always Known
by PharaonicWolf
Summary: Q's been kidnapped by someone who knew him years before MI6, and Bond will have to delve into the Quartermaster's checkered past to hopefully bring him back alive.
1. A boring mission becomes interesting

**Author's notes:**

Oh man, I'm writing fanfiction again after a hiatus of YEARS. And Skyfall fiction, to boot.

I'm not British, nor am I an expert in any of the things Q needs to know for his job (or his extracurriculars), so please point out any errors you might find.

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**One. A boring mission becomes more interesting.**

James Bond sipped a cup of coffee, unfolded the _Daily_ _Telegraph_, and focused the lens of the camera embedded in his sunglasses on a brown station wagon parked across the street.

"Are you getting this?"

"Crystal clear." Through Bond's earpiece came the muffled clattering of quick typing. "Stolen yesterday from a plumber in Brighton. Didn't even bother to swap out the tags."

"We're not exactly handling geniuses," Bond muttered behind his newspaper. Mallory had handwaved Bond's failure of his most recent physicals in light of his performance at Skyfall, but the new M was less willing to overlook the psychological evaluation, especially because he seemed to have caught the idea that his predecessor's death made Bond less effective. Grief, or a reluctance to transfer his loyalty, or something like that. Bond had bluntly dismissed the idea, hoping that his disdainful conviction would illustrate how stupid it really was – but M had raised his eyebrows and confined him to Europe until further notice. Thus the outdoor café, the station wagon containing some very dull criminals, and the kid in his earpiece sounding much more excited than he had any right to be.

"They're moving."

"I'm not blind." Bond folded the paper, tossed some change on the table, and trotted around the corner and into an alleyway behind an Italian restaurant. MI6 had once given the building owner a new name, job, and apartment for his own protection, and in return he granted them free parking.

"Where are they?" Bond asked, typing the passcode into the car door.

"Three blocks north. Moving slowly, but once they get past the roundabout they'll pick up speed. Cut across on Mullarney Street and you'll catch up."

An outside observer wouldn't have tagged the kid as excited, but Bond had spent enough time with his voice over the last three months to notice the tiny uptick in speed, the slightly higher pitch, and, in the background, the way he jabbed at his computer keys with more force than necessary. This was probably the first time he'd been allowed out of the office while on the clock.

The car was disappointing. "You couldn't have allocated me something with voice commands?"

"I'm teaching you how to be more discreet, 007. Keep driving flashy cars and everyone will know you're an agent of the Queen."

Bond sighed and turned right onto Mullarney. "Once upon a time, that was the point."

"You're not Batman. It's not your job to strike fear into the hearts of the general criminal populace."

The kid was chiding him. Bond assuaged himself with his recurring fantasy of slapping the kid so hard his glasses flew off his nose.

"They're four cars ahead of you now, do you see them?"

"Yes. Where are you?"

"Ten blocks west. Keeping level with you."

Get them outside the city, tap the car, dispatch and restrain driver and passenger, radio Q the moment it was done so he could close in with his crew. Do not attempt to open any of the boxes. Although it would certainly endanger civilians, Bond longed for a high-speed chase.

He deliberately kept three or four cars between himself and the station wagon until they had left the neat blocks of office buildings and the road opened up, leading them past increasingly scattered retail developments and petrol stations. In the side mirror he saw the white van containing Q's team, camouflaged with a logo and phone number for a fictional landscaping business, pull into one of the petrol stations and park near the air pump.

"Very few cameras out here," Q told him. "I'd appreciate it if you could crash them within the next five miles or so, before I lose visual completely."

"Simple." Bond floored the car for a couple of seconds, just to inject a little excitement into the game, then eased up and focused on steering. Right lane clear; a little bump, spin them into the guardrail. He was close enough to see the driver's reflection glancing at him in the mirror. The wagon's turn signal flicked on.

The impact jerked his head back, as it always did, not enough to cause whiplash because he'd been trained for much worse than this. He had already pointed the wheels towards the empty right lane, and his car sailed clearly past the skidding station wagon; he braked, swung the sedan around to block both lanes, and was out on the pavement with gun cocked before either car had stopped moving. The passenger jumped out, stupidly, and Bond shot his legs out from under him. The driver had crawled over the seats into the back of the station wagon, which made things marginally more difficult; he could not fire at the car because that risked igniting the explosives booby-trapping the boxes.

"Double-oh-seven –" Alarm from Q.

"I _know_ about the boxes."

Bond raced to the injured man, hauled him up with his hands behind his back and used him as a shield. The driver screamed something from inside the car, but his sidekick was stuttering, "Oh God, Oh God," over and over again and Bond couldn't parse the driver's words.

"Shut up," he snarled at the wounded man, and silenced him with a swift strike from the non-lethal end of his gun.

"– told you they were following us ten miles ago, where _are_ you?" The driver's desperation gratified Bond. Of course, a worthy adversary wouldn't fear him, but occasionally it was nice to stroke the ego by hunting young rabbits.

And these two were embarrassingly inexperienced considering the cargo they were hauling: more than five million in counterfeit money, sealed in a dozen plastic containers rigged to explode if not opened with the proper fingerprint. The white van Bond had left behind at the petrol station contained a bomb-defusing robot that would theoretically open at least one of the cases so they could examine the bills, and the robot's escort team: two field agents, two techies, and Q.

Bond circled the car, looking for the clearest shot. The driver was still yelping into his mobile with one hand ("What do you _mean_ you got hung up?") and pointing a gun with the other, but his hands shook so badly that Bond was sure any bullets would miss.

The robot was what had the kid all hot and bothered. He had written the software and supervised the hardware development, and he had sent M an eight-page memo explaining why he should personally review the bot's first foray into the field instead of watching the video feed from the safety of headquarters. The stakes of this particular mission were low enough that permission had been granted, as long as he consented to be accompanied by a pair of back-up field agents.

Bond took aim through the windshield – and in the narrow window of time right before he fired, when it was too late to signal his finger not to pull the trigger, the driver's mobile slipped from his sweaty fingers and he dove down to retrieve it. The bullet punched a massive spiderweb crack in the back window instead.

The driver's gun appeared over the edge of the passenger seat and he fired wildly. Bond dropped his human shield – too cumbersome – dodged around the side of the car, and aimed through one of the tinted windows. This time his bullet slammed the goon back against the far door. His head dropped to his chest; probably not dead, but he would be soon if medical didn't come.

Bond holstered his gun and opened the back hatch. "Q, order me an ambulance and get down here with your toy."

Static.

He couldn't be out of range; the petrol station was three miles behind. "Q?"

Without the bustle of city traffic or the burst of gunfire, even that little bit of static seemed unbearably loud.

"Someone answer me –"

A loud click, like a pair of headphones plugging in, and an unfamiliar voice: "'Ello, double-oh-sev'n."

Bond ran through the possibilities, catalogued the details: a man, probably in his early forties, Cockney, a smoker.

"Yeh know, I always wondered 'ow a secret agent knows everyfing goin' on 'round 'im," the stranger mused. "Turns out 'e's got a lil' birdie chirpin' in 'is ear." A pause, a rustle, and then the stranger's voice glowed with such dark satisfaction that Bond forgot the two men he had wounded, the counterfeit bills, the wail of sirens in the distance. "And I bet yeh didn' know _this_ lil' bird is worth a pretty sum."

In his most dangerous voice, Bond said, "If I find any of them dead –"

"Relax, double-oh, I ain't killed 'em." The stranger sounded exasperated, almost wounded that Bond would think him capable of such a thing. "I'm stakin' one claim – got a buyer already lined up – and yeh can keep the mooks an' the money an' all the rest o' yer crew. Deal?"

"You must be joking."

"Cheer up, I'm doin' yeh a favor. Suave guy like yerself must _hate_ bein' bossed 'round by a lil' git like 'im. Now, enjoy the rest o' yer evenin', double-oh."

The click again, then static. Just static. Bond yanked out the traitorous earpiece and flung it from him as hard as he could, into a darkening copse of trees that flickered blue in the light of the approaching police.


	2. The Cockney and Q

**Two. The Cockney and Q.**

Q lay very still and felt his heart pound against his temples and listened to the sound of his own breathing. He had opened his eyes once, but that had made the room tilt sideways almost far enough to topple him from the bed, and all he had seen was a blurred gray ceiling with a florescent light fixture – it could be any ceiling in any building in any country in the world. His mouth seemed to have stopped producing saliva some time ago. Nausea crashed over him and he rolled sideways and vomited off the side of the bed. When he had regained his breath, he continued to lie that way, head hanging towards the ground, because the fresh flow of blood eased the vertigo.

_Sedatives. Double-oh-seven had fired at one of the counterfeiting mules and the gunshot had been so loud in his earpiece that for a moment he had confused it with the sound of the van doors wrenching open from the outside. Ambush. The field agent who was driving hadn't even seen them coming. The agent in the back got off one shot before they hit her with the tranquilizers, and then it was too late, the other men had the techies as hostages and the driver could do nothing. A gap-toothed grin. An overwhelming odor of cigarettes right at his back and someone had fisted their hand in his hair and he had felt a little prick, that was all. _

Q raised his head a fraction and peered out at the room through his bangs. Without his glasses, all the small details were lost in the fuzz and shadows could trick him. The room was tiny, more like a prison cell than an office, but there was a paper-piled desk wedged against one wall and a door opposite him with a little window in it. The glass was not perfectly clear; it had some kind of pattern that Q could not make out – probably wire reinforcements, but with his poor vision it could just be dirt. A series of darker smudges formed an arch too perfect to be accidental: a name, or job title maybe, painted on the outside of the glass. If only he had the faintest idea what it said.

_Give up on fashion and get contacts, you effing moron_.

A map of the U.K. taped above the desk – he'd recognize the shape of the islands in his sleep – but absolutely nothing else on the cinderblock walls. Light fixture. His cot. Q sat up, very slowly, and found himself unrestrained. He worked his hands to the bottoms of his trouser pockets and came up empty. No radio.

The door banged open so hard that it bounced off the wall and had to be elbowed aside by the man stomping through in a flak vest and wellies. With him came the thick cloud of cigarette smell that colored Q's memories of his abduction from the van.

"Mornin', princess."

Even at a distance Q could see the gap in his teeth, a spot of darkness in the yellowed curve. His boots squished as he walked to the desk; he had come recently from somewhere muddy. Q kept his eyes on him. _Remember everything._

"_You_, darlin', 'ave made me a rich man today." The Cockney shuffled through a sheaf of papers, came up with one that he held briefly to the light, folded it and slipped it inside his vest. "So I'll make yeh a promise. Don' struggle, an' I won' 'urt yeh."

"…Right." Q hoped his tone conveyed skepticism without sounding defiant enough to provoke injury. He needed more time to refine his mental file on this man, because when he got back to MI6 there would be a lot of awkward questions about who had put up the money for the kidnapping, and the roster of enemies Q had accumulated was dramatically disproportionate to his short life. Any detail might knock a few names off the suspect list.

Gray t-shirt under the vest. Cargo pants. Large hands with thick fingers, swollen in places that suggested calluses.

Cockney approached the cot and stopped just outside an arm's length, between Q and the door. At this distance Q could make out more details of his face. Rough skin. Rounded jaw. Thick blond eyebrows. Pale eyes.

One hand fished through several pockets in his vest before coming up with a boxy black thumb-sized thing. Switchblade.

He leaned in and Q lashed out – caught the wrist of the bladed hand, other set of knuckles sinking sickeningly into the eye socket, he could feel the shape of the surrounding bones – Cockney howled and backhanded Q so hard that his head cracked against the metal bar at the end of the cot and he tasted something sharp and awful. He thought that Cockney was standing above him with one hand pressing the forehead just above his streaming and swelling eye, but every heartbeat pulsed black spots against his vision.

"I offered yeh th' easy way, didn' I?"

Hands seized a shoulder and an ankle, rolling him roughly onto his stomach. Weight settled on his legs and the cot sagged. Calluses against his neck, holding his face down on the pillow; Q thrashed until the pressure eased enough for him to turn his head and breathe.

"Lie back an' think o' England fer a minute, _sweet'eart_," and this time the pet name sounded like a curse. "Gotta make sure yeh ain't carryin' any surprises when I 'and yeh over."

The little black object hovered at the corner of Q's eye; it buzzed faintly, like speakers being disrupted by mobile-phone frequencies. Cockney stretched out one of Q's arms and ran the sensor along it, two passes, back and forth.

Q knew what would come in a few moments' time, and he thought he might be sick again, as Cockney checked his other arm and the thudding in his ears spread more blood from the place where the cot had split him open. For the first time he considered how easy it would be for him to die, and for MI6 to never find his body.

The scanner pipped three times, right at the base of Q's neck.

"Knew it." Cockney sounded vindicated. Q could tell, from the shifting of his weight and the rustling, that Cockney had sat back to find something else in his pockets, and, from Q's own knowledge of what the scanner had found, that this time it actually would be a knife.

Cockney hooked two fingers into the back of Q's shirt collar and pulled down. The blade flicked open so close to Q's skin that he felt a tiny breeze.

"This is felony destruction of government property, you know," he mumbled into the pillow, then silently cursed himself. Out of the half-dozen smart remarks competing for space in his fogged brain, that had to be the stupidest one.

Cockney laughed as he dug the blade in.


	3. Bond attempts to recover the goods

**Three. Bond attempts to recover the goods.**

This was not the first time Tanner had been sent to rescue Bond from police custody. The first time, more than a year ago, Bond had jumped from the moving police car, slipped his handcuffs, and almost incited a city-wide manhunt before Tanner got there and sorted everything out. This time he called ahead to let everyone know he was coming, which at least convinced Bond to sit semi-quietly in the holding cell and not make Tanner's job any more difficult than it already was.

"Sorry, chief," the officer explained as he unlocked the door. "He had no identification, and he admitted to shootin' those suspects, so what was I to think?"

Tanner had never been quite as good at this part as M, but Bond almost admired his look of exasperation. It certainly would have shamed an ordinary underling. "I recall you being ordered to carry your MI6 ID with you."

Bond shrugged. He never explained himself to anyone lower than M; that would imply regret.

They did not talk again until Tanner's discreetly armored work car had put two blocks between themselves and the police station. "What's the situation?" Bond asked, as soon as he realized that Tanner would not supply any details without prompting.

"We've already got the counterfeiters cleaned up." He was deliberately leading with the least important part, the bastard. "We recovered the techs and the field agents and all of their equipment, including the robot. None of them were seriously injured, though we're going to monitor Groves for concussion, and they drugged Flanagan, so we're doing bloodwork on her to make sure it wasn't anything nasty –"

"But you didn't recover Q."

Tanner checked a street sign against the GPS on the dash and turned left onto a road approaching the river. "No. We have a read on where they took him, though."

Bond raised his eyebrows, surprised at last. "Track the getaway vehicle?"

"Something like that. You know I never ask." Tanner pulled into an alley, stopped the car, and brought up a map on his phone, which he handed to Bond. "He's in a warehouse three blocks closer to the water. Darabont Construction. At this time of day all the, er, legitimate workers have gone home. Get in, get Q, and get out. I'll be circling the block, ready to pick you up."

As Bond opened the door, still examining the map, Tanner added, "We're fairly confident this isn't a trap –"

"– A trap for me, you mean."

"Well, yes –" Tanner recovered much faster than Bond assumed him capable of, and threw something approaching Bond's own sardonic smile back at him. "Isn't it nice not to be the target for a change?"

Flashes: a tunnel crumbling beneath a rogue train; the Aston Martin with M in the passenger seat; his boyhood home, under attack. The words came easily and cleared the smile from Tanner's face. "If I'm doing my job right, I shouldn't be the target. But sometimes it's necessary to become the target to take the heat off less expendable people."

Bond made to hand back the phone, but Tanner waved him off: "Do call, please, when you're out."

As Tanner drove away, Bond stared after the car and caught Tanner's glance in the rearview mirror. Concern. For him, or for the kid. Or – less palatable – for both.

He put his camera sunglasses back on, though they weren't transmitting to anyone anymore, and kept his steps measured as he walked the three blocks. The Darabont warehouse had laughable security: a barbed-wire fence, but with the gate swinging open; locked docking doors, but only with a store-bought padlock and chain that Bond broke with a chunk of cinderblock lying in the dusty yard. He rolled up the door just high enough to duck under with gun drawn and was greeted by silence and emptiness.

Bond moved along the perimeter of the main floor. On one side a metal staircase led to a pair of offices, one dark, the other lit. No doors to a basement of any kind. Bond took the stairs.

The dark office was locked with just as many precautions as the outside door; he didn't even need a tool this time, just a firm hand and a strong shoulder. Someone had clearly been here within the last few hours – a ring on the desk where a coffee cup had sat was still slightly damp – but it was only a typical foreman's office, blueprints and handheld levels and a safety helmet and vest on the back of the door.

Bond approached the lit office with greater caution, and a growing sense that this recovery mission might be more complicated than MI6 thought.

Chipped black paint on the window proclaimed the second office to belong to Mike Darabont, Senior Draftsman – but whoever that was, he wasn't here. There was no one here. Bond had burst through the door expecting a fight and found himself pointing his gun at all corners of an empty room.

He pulled out Tanner's phone and stabbed a few buttons. "He's gone."

"What?" Tanner's level of bewilderment surpassed what Bond would expect, even for someone unfamiliar with field work. "The team says the tracking signal is definitely coming from that building –"

"Maybe it is." Something out of place on the back wall: a plastic sandwich baggie taped above a camping bed. Crusted vomit on the floor, and – Bond's jaw tightened – blood on the pillow. He tore the baggie from the wall and felt shock, revulsion, and fury, and he could not say whether those emotions were directed in greater degree at the kidnappers or at MI6.

Inside the bag: a microchip the size of a grain of rice, a microchip that, judging from the smear of blood trailing it from the lip of the bag to the place where it had settled in the bottom, had been removed from a living creature. And written on the bag in felt-tipped marker, in a large, blocky hand, two words:

NICE TRY.


	4. Q meets the mastermind

**Author's notes:**

This chapter is very short - a transitional chapter, really - but I promise things will start revving up beginning with the very next chapter.

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**Four. Q meets the mastermind.**

Another boxy, undecorated room. This time they had left his glasses within his reach, on the seat of a heavy wooden chair. As Q put them on, his hand brushed gauze; someone had bandaged the wound at his temple. Judging from the prickling at the back of his neck and the way the skin tightened as though straining against tape whenever he turned his head, they had also patched the place where Cockney had extracted the microchip. They – whoever they were – wanted him alive for a little longer.

And still mostly unrestrained – he had sat up, curled his legs beneath him, and put on his glasses without discovering any restrictions. But every movement generated a slithering, clinking sound, like a handful of coins cascading over more coins in a ceramic dish. And there was something long and cold and heavy against his back. He reached behind himself, took hold of whatever it was, and drew it over his shoulder.

A chain. He followed it up to his neck and fingered the fastening. The links could slide through each other to tighten or loosen the loop, though a little metal bar prevented it from loosening far enough for him to slip it over his head. The far end linked to an eye bolt set into the floor; he could see the uneven, discolored seam where a patch of concrete had been removed and recast. Q spent enough time modeling unlikely devices in CAD labs that his brain automatically alerted him to the best features: _Designed both to restrain and punish, and easy and cheap to manufacture._

He stood and explored the room. His captor had given him a generous length of chain, probably ten feet, more than enough for him to walk up to and touch each of the walls. Cold, but dry – a well-insulated basement. No windows, no furniture except for the pair of heavy chairs, a square table, and a clock on the back wall. Numerous pipes above his head created an artificial drop ceiling in the center of the room – more evidence in favor of basement.

The ceiling and a pair of door hinges creaked, somewhere above and to the right. Footsteps tramped down stairs.

This time when the door opened Q was prepared: on his feet, alert, with the table between him and the stranger and his hands on the back of a chair, ready to wield it if necessary. Two men entered, single file, the first dressed all in heavy black – boots, turtleneck, armored vest like the riot police – and nearly twice as broad in the shoulders as Q. In one hand he carried a riding crop, and the ominous implications drew Q's eyes as the man stepped aside to let his partner in and reached back to shut the door behind them.

Then Q got a good look at the second person, a polished blond man with a beige suit and a hardshell briefcase, and realized that he was not as prepared as he had hoped.

The voice had deepened and coarsened a little over the years, but Q could still predict the inflections perfectly, didn't even have to look to see the tiny quirk of the lips that accompanied the greeting.

"Hello, Ben. It's been a while."


	5. Bond learns some dirty secrets

**Author's notes:**

Now we're getting somewhere!

But first, an apologetic note.

After I had finished this chapter, I learned that _Casino Royale_ has a scene where Bond is microchipped so MI6 can monitor him during his mission - though it's clear in _Skyfall_ that he no longer has the microchip, or else they might have been able to find him during his period of "death." I started to revise this chapter to reflect _Casino Royale_, but ultimately I decided to leave it as it was, since A) this fic is doubtless full of continuity errors, as the only Bond films I've watched in their entirety are _Skyfall_ and_Goldfinger_, and B) Bond canon isn't very good at continuity anyway. Regardless of whether Bond would accept being microchipped (which young!Bond might but I very much doubt older!Bond would), I think Bond would have qualms about the idea of Q being microchipped, because he's not a field agent and because Bond knows all about the dangers of keeping scientists in thrall to a particular organization.

Anyway, as always, your comments are greatly appreciated.

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**Five. Bond learns some dirty secrets.**

Bond enjoyed Moneypenny, but at the moment he had no time for her. He heard her calling his name sharply and the chair creaking as she stood up, but by that point he was already shutting M's office door behind him.

"I know it's too much to ask for you to make an appointment, but do knock next time," Mallory said, frowning at something on his computer screen.

Bond tossed the plastic bag on M's desk, right between the hands that were pecking at the keyboard. "You had him microchipped –"

M stilled for a beat, hands arrested. "He consented to it."

"– like a dog," Bond pushed.

They stared at each other across the desk, one thunderous, the other neutral.

"Do you rehearse that expression in the mirror every morning?" Bond sneered, and allowed himself a grain of pleasure at the irritation that knitted Mallory's eyebrows. "Tell me you haven't had _me_ microchipped during some routine medical procedure."

Silence, for much longer than he would like. M picked up the plastic bag and turned it around and around in his hands, examining it from all angles, holding it up to his desk lamp, focusing on first the blood smear, then the microchip. He finally glanced up with a tiny start, as though he had forgotten that Bond was there, and Bond realized that he would have to reevaluate, again, the scope of the trouble they were in.

Vaguely, eyes on the middle distance, M said, "MI6 does not routinely plant locator chips on its employees. Q is a special case."

"Is he using himself as a guinea pig?" It sounded like the sort of thing the kid would do.

M frowned in a manner that Bond did not recognize – a frown without anger or annoyance, a crinkling of the forehead, with a pronounced line right between his eyebrows. Uncertainty, with an undercurrent of worry.

"You don't know who he is, do you? How he came to be part of Q branch, what he did before we took him on?"

Bond raised his eyebrows. "Should I?"

M sighed. "I'm afraid it might be relevant. You'll have to forgive any gaps in my knowledge; I didn't know the full story at the time, though I have done my reading since." He turned his chair toward the window; Bond settled himself in one of the armchairs off to the side of the desk, so he could still see Mallory's face.

"Do you remember about eight years ago, when the Secret Intelligence Service database was hacked and dozens of secure documents were posted online? You might not know the details; I believe you were in Cambodia at the time."

Bond nodded.

"Over a period of two years, the database was hacked five times. In total more than a thousand pages of material was stolen. Each time was a disaster – for public relations, for foreign policy, for several sensitive missions around the globe. Each time we brought in a new security team to beef up our protocols, but the attacks did not stop. However, the last team we brought in was able to tell us something very interesting.

"The stolen documents were invariably posted with short messages – abstracts of their contents, sort of – and language analysis seemed to indicate that all the attacks had been carried out by the same person." M's eyes darted sideways to gauge the effect his story was having, but Bond gave away nothing, as always.

"My predecessor launched an investigation. Whoever we were chasing was very good. They covered their tracks for an additional two years after the SIS hacking had stopped. But we had some help – you see, the hacker also liked to smear international corporations and various highly visible businessmen. And he made the mistake of targeting the United States Department of Defense." M smiled grimly over the rim of his mug.

"When we caught him, the hacker was twenty-three years old. He was a doctoral candidate at Cambridge. He was wanted in six countries. He had stolen nearly five million pounds through securities fraud. Basically, he was headed to prison for a significant chunk of his life – assuming one of the many dangerous people he had offended didn't find him first. You see, he had also hacked several terrorist cells and drug cartels in the Middle East and South America and delivered some extremely useful information to Interpol."

Of course. The kid had enough hubris to play a vigilante. "You cut him a deal."

"It would have been a shame to waste that kind of talent. So we erased him."

"You – what?" It was not the erasure that surprised Bond as much as who it had been done to; he could easily imagine the kid, cocky and Cambridge-bound, inflicting his own version of justice from the bubble of a campus computer lab, but he had always disdained Q branch for their relatively normal lives, the children and spouses they went home to, the routines they established, the stability of working in an office and seeing the business end of a gun only when they had the luxury to think about design.

M was explaining: "We erased all records that he had ever existed. It was simple. At that point it was not public knowledge that we had caught the hacker, or even that one person was responsible for all of the attacks. He had almost no relatives or friends. We assigned him a nominal identity simply so he could have a government ID to carry and a consistent story for anyone he happens to meet outside the office. We gave him a new flat. It's not the first time we've done this, Mr. Bond."

Bond scoffed; as if Mallory could tell him anything new about disappearing. He had resolved to ignore Mallory's annoying habit of referring to "we" and "us" in a timeline of events that he had not been part of, but his patience was wearing. Time to return to essentials: "The microchip."

"Yes, well –" M frowned, the same combination of uncomfortable and worried. "I have no illusions about the eminence of MI6. If we were able to find him, it is entirely possible that others will. After all, we can't erase the memories of the people who knew him, and we suspect that he had accomplices in at least some of his crimes – he refuses to verify that."

"So the chip is for his protection."

"Yes – though clearly it's not foolproof –"

"I don't think that's true."

Bond paused, made M wait, because he knew that Mallory would.

"I think it's for _your_ protection. I bet you watch all his communications, don't you? Phone, email?"

"He must honor a few restrictions." M cocked a wry eyebrow. "But he's earned quite a few privileges back during his rise through the Q branch. For good behavior."

"_Good behav –_" But Bond cut himself off, recognizing the rage that threatened to rampage through his restraint. Loss of control would mean ceding the higher ground.

The door clicked open. Moneypenny looked between the two of them, and Bond didn't miss the warning she aimed in his direction: _Don't do anything stupid_. "Sir, early results of the tech team's analysis are coming through. I'm forwarding them as they arrive."

"Thank you, Eve." It took Mallory a moment to pull up the files on his computer; Bond helped himself to wine from the decanter on the center table and imagined his anger settling like dregs to the bottom of the glass.

"Well." Mallory's pleasant surprise lured Bond back to the desk. "Looks like there were three sets of fingerprints in that office at Darabont. One we couldn't match – no criminal record. The second belongs to Mike Darabont, part-owner of the warehouse – he was arrested six years ago for driving under the influence, nothing before or since. The third is Dennis Rafferty – he's had multiple arrests for aggravated assault and the like."

"I'm guessing he's our man." And if he wasn't, perhaps Bond would go out and rough him up anyway, see if he knew who else might have access to the Darabont office, work out some residual anger through blatant disobedience.

"Sure as hell looks that way. He left a thumbprint under the doorknob with traces of blood."

An insult, that Q would be taken by someone so sloppy. Bond set aside his wine glass, feeling a twinge of adrenaline, just a taste of what he would experience when he cornered this man. "Do we know where to find him?"

Suspicion colored M's tone; he knew Bond that well, at least. "MI5 has been keeping tabs on Rafferty since his most recent parole. He's got some low-level ties to an organized crime ring they've been circling. I think they were intending to use him to lure out the bigger fish."

"Tell them they'll need new bait."

Bond didn't wait for any sort of dismissal. He strode for the door and it was only M's level of astonishment that stopped him.

"Where are _you_ going?"

Over the years Bond had perfected an eyebrow lift that slid seamlessly into an incredulous frown, the best expression of _I can't believe your stupidity_: since it was wordless, most people let the disrespect slide, but the message came through loud and clear.

And Mallory must have received it, because his tone sharpened. "Stop and think. MI5 is watching his usual haunts right now. They know his habits. With one phone call I can have him here in an hour, rather than the three or four it will take _you_ to blunder around London while a secretary at 5 tries to dig up the right address."

A prickly silence hung between them. Through the door Bond could hear Moneypenny talking in low tones, with empty space between sentences – she was on the phone, possibly to the tech team, possibly to MI5 already.

Softly, as though to smooth things over, Mallory said, "Let the boys at 5 handle this, Bond."

But Bond could no longer mask his contempt. "Still don't trust me, do you?"

Everything about Mallory hardened to match. "I trust only so far as the job requires."

"I see. Hence the microchip."

Mallory sighed and touched a hand to his temple as though he ached. "That wasn't my order."

"But you could have reversed it."

"The ethics of MI6's deal with a known cybercriminal are not up for debate. A man's life is at stake, not to mention all the classified information in his head, and I'm the one who makes the final call."

An echo: _Take the bloody shot._ "I know."

M leaned back in his chair as if trying to absorb the greater picture of Bond. He wore a thoughtful, calculating expression designed to make its recipient uncomfortable, make them wonder what he was staring at, make them ask. It might have worked on a less experienced agent. Bond was back at the door before Mallory cracked.

"I'm surprised you'd stick your neck out for him. I got the impression you didn't much care for him."

"He stuck his neck out for me once."

_I'm guessing this is not official?_

_Not even remotely._

_So much for my promising career in espionage._

Mallory's moment of confusion was disappointingly brief; he nodded as though he were trying not to smile. "Yes, I recall."

"Though I suppose you couldn't exactly have fired him," Bond grumbled. He would have to reconsider quite a few of the kid's actions, actually, in light of what Mallory had told him. Eight-page memo, indeed.

He had his hand on the doorknob, but a final thought turned him back. "What _will_ you do if you someday decide you no longer need his services?"

M smiled without his earlier uncertainty, a controlled smile with a hint of mystery, the smile of a man secure in his own secrets. It didn't achieve the authority of his predecessor, but Bond had not been expecting it, not from Mallory, and respect uncurled against his wishes.

M said, "He's an enterprising man. He'll be fine," and then he looked back at his computer and Bond understood that nothing more would be said.


	6. A standoff ensues

If the businessmen drink my blood  
Like the kids in art school said they would  
Then I guess I'll just begin again  
You say, "Can we still be friends?"

If I was scared - I would  
And if I was bored - you know I would  
And if I was yours - but I'm not

- Arcade Fire, "Ready to Start"

* * *

**Six. A standoff ensues.**

"Hello, Colin. If you wanted to catch up, you could have phoned, instead of arranging a kidnapping."

"I didn't arrange anything. I simply let it be known, to the world at large, that I wanted to get in touch with you." Colin glanced at the bandage on Q's head with a poor imitation of pity. "The microchip incident was unavoidable, but I _did_ ask that you not be harmed. I docked Rafferty ten percent of his pay for what he did to you."

"I'm charmed to know that you still care."

Colin's lips curved, but not in a smile. He sat down at the table and motioned for Q to do the same.

"I'm fine where I am, thanks." Q could not keep his eyes from wandering to the man with the riding crop, who was leaning against the wall beside the door and idly scrolling down the screen of an iPhone.

"Don't worry about Dwyer," Colin said calmly, setting his heavy briefcase on the table in front of him. "He's my bodyguard – just here as insurance."

Q raised his eyebrows in patronizing surprise. "You're important enough to have a bodyguard."

"Yes. I'm surprised that you aren't, given the work you do for MI6."

Another unexpected point in an unexpected conversation. Q had already considered the possibility that Colin Burns was behind his abduction and, separately, the possibility that Colin knew about his position with Q branch, but the combined probability had seemed so small that he had dismissed the idea. Over the years he had come to believe that he had permanently extricated himself from Colin; Q couldn't imagine him expending the effort it must have taken to track down a person with an entirely new identity. And he was impatient – if Colin wanted revenge, why hadn't he attempted it when they were still living on the same campus? He studied Colin's face, twisting the variables like the sides of a Rubik's Cube, sorting them into what he hoped was the correct color scheme.

This time Colin actually smiled. It made him look both boyish and experienced – a cherub with a devil peeking through the eyes. At eighteen Q had been jealous of the way that smile attracted women.

"Now _that's_ a look I haven't seen in a long time," Colin said slyly. "You puzzling out some problem you can't quite get. When you solved it you could be a right smug bastard, and if you didn't you'd mope for days." He mocked a pout, then slid into a smirk. "I don't want to see either of those sides of you today, so I'll explain everything, you'll do me a favor, and then we'll never have to see each other again, hmm?"

"I'm thrilled about that last part, yes," Q said.

Colin's eyebrows twitched. For a second he looked at Q as though savoring something secret, something this meeting had suddenly reminded him of.

"When I left Cambridge," he said, "I tried to look you up. I thought it might be a good idea for us to resolve some of our unfinished business."

Q narrowed his eyes, and Colin laughed.

"And _there's_ your skeptical look. I have to admit, sometimes I get nostalgic for our days as a team." He rested a hand on his heart, briefly. Q kept his eyes narrowed and hoped that Colin burned in the heat of his distrust.

"All right, I admit it," Colin continued, "I wanted revenge. I had all these half-formed plans about how I was going to take down your one-man hacking operation, expose you, send you to prison, _steal_ from you the way you did me –" He paused, collected himself, and leaned back in his chair. A light of fascination came into his eyes. "Imagine my surprise when I discovered that Ben Rossum never graduated from Cambridge – nor was there any record that he had actually attended Cambridge at all. He wasn't on any electoral roll in the United Kingdom. He had never been issued a passport or a driver's license. No known address. No telephone number. He simply didn't exist.

"Now, at the time, I thought you had gotten yourself in trouble and somehow fled the country. But why erase the old records? Paranoia?" Colin turned his eyes to the ceiling and twisted his mouth in pretend contemplation. "No, you've never been paranoid – you think you're too smart for anyone to catch you. I pondered it for a few months, poked around in a few places I thought you might be, and then I gave it up. I was working for Barclays and making good money and I was in a pretty good place. I'd even given up hacking – mostly."

Then he paused. Q knew this game: Colin wouldn't say more until the eager listener begged him to continue. Q resolved not to frame it as a question, or in any other way that could be construed as begging. "But that didn't last long, I take it."

"Bored." Colin shrugged. "You know the feeling. No challenge anymore. So I decided to set myself up for a comfortable life, beyond Barclays and beyond England. I was high enough in Barclays that I could view the details of any account I wished – any number of accounts, all at once. Just sitting there. Ripe for the taking."

Q understood. He had suspected it would go this way ever since Colin had said he worked for a bank. "Penny slicing."

"Exactly. We'd done it once before, do you remember?" Colin waited for Q to nod before he went on. "Steal a few pennies from one account and all you've got is street change. Steal a few pennies from a few _million_ accounts each and you've got enough to support yourself for a lifetime. I knew the code. I had the overseas accounts ready and waiting. But there was a snag in Barclays' security software. I actually had to look closely at the source code to find the problem." Colin rolled his eyes to indicate just how far beneath him that was – and then he smirked with a rapacious glee that made Q's knuckles whiten on the chair back. "And as soon as I saw it, I knew it was you."

"…What?" Q didn't actually need an explanation, but that look had thrown him. He had seen its prototype many times, in the thrill of the hack, but until now it had never been directed at him.

"_You_ wrote it. I know the way you write code – _how_ many times did you dismantle mine and make it better, faster, more efficient? And you had written it recently, too; there were tricks in there no one had even imagined seven years ago at Cambridge. So Ben Rossum really was out there, somewhere, and writing security software for Barclays.

"I made some inquiries. Barclays had bought the software from Consolidated Internet Security. Turns out they're a shell corporation that modifies and markets products developed by the Secret Intelligence Service for use by private companies."

Colin's grin was smaller now, more secretive, but it still brimmed with a discomfiting greed.

"Ben Rossum, coding for MI6. And doing so much _sensitive_ coding that they felt it would be best for you to disappear." Something in Q's face made Colin hold up his hands disarmingly. "I'm not going to ask for government secrets. I just want to bypass Barclays' security, I promise." He flicked the locks on the briefcase, opened the lid, and withdrew a laptop with the power light already on and waiting.

Q marshaled the full force of his disdain. "You remain a man of small ambition."

All of Colin's good humor dropped away. His eyes lidded contemptuously and his mouth twitched. "I remember questions of my... ambition being the source of most of our disagreements at school. Let's not let it get in the way of business today, hmm?"

"What if I refuse?" Q asked, just to know the particulars.

Colin pretended to consider for a moment. Q decided that these melodramatic tendencies were more annoying than he remembered.

"Well, Dwyer's not exactly _excited_ about spending his afternoon watching two old friends reminisce. I suppose he could vent his frustrations on you."

Q glanced at Dwyer, who gave him a quick courtesy smile and went back to his phone. The riding crop tapped against his leg in an ominous metronomic rhythm.

In the silence Q was sharply aware of time ticking by, of the conflicting paths of appeasement and escape and their many permutations, of the fact that the longer he stayed in the kidnapper's grip the less likely he was to be found alive. He looked down at the computer and nodded. With a grin, Colin passed it over. Q sat down and propped his elbows on the table edge, leaning forward so the chain draped over his legs like a snake.

"I need your password."

"Can't you figure it out?" Colin teased.

Q bit down the urge to sigh or roll his eyes. Appeasement, not provocation. Not yet. "I could. But it'd be much faster if you just gave it to me."

Colin shrugged, conceding the point, and leaned across the table to take the laptop back, rising half-out of his seat.

Q had the chain around his neck in a blink, had Colin dragged around the table and pressed against him like a shield. Dwyer sprang forward a step, riding crop drawn back like a tennis racket, hand poised over a trouser pocket.

Face white, Colin snarled, "_Take_ him, you moron, he's –" Q jerked the chain and the words cut off with a squawk.

"You're going to give me the knife you've got hidden in your pocket," he ordered Dwyer, with the same professional certainty he adopted around the much-older members of Q branch; give them any reason to question your authority and they'd pounce. "Then you're going to undo the chain around my neck or I'll twist until his head snaps off."

Dwyer looked from Q, whose eyes were ice, to Colin, who mouthed something Q didn't catch. Then he nodded, drew out the switchblade, placed it on the table away from both of them. Q tightened his grip, tightened the chain, as Dwyer approached, and Colin made a wheezing, hissing sound. The inside of Q's wrist pressed against Colin's neck and he had no idea if the pounding heartbeat he felt was Colin's or his own.

Dwyer reached up with both hands for the loop of chain around Q's neck. Q felt a tug.

Then Dwyer drove the heel of his hand into Q's bandaged wound and pain exploded at the back of his neck, inside his head, behind his eyes, and his whole body jerked away from Colin and Dwyer, the chain trailing out between his fingers like kite string unwinding. Colin twisted away; Q made a grab for the chain still draped around Colin's neck, but the riding crop cracked across his shoulders and he stumbled. His hand scrabbled at the table, clawing for the knife, but Dwyer swept it to the floor with a flick of the crop and Colin dove for it. Q tackled him and they rolled over, like schoolboys in a locker-room brawl, but then the chain closed like a noose around Q's neck: Dwyer had coiled most of the ten feet around his arm, and he reeled Q in until he could fist the chain right behind Q's head and hold on tight.

Colin got to his feet with the knife in one hand and slicked back his hair. The chain had marked his throat from ear to ear, like a grotesque smile.

"You've always been a little bastard, Ben," he rasped.

Q could not speak. Dwyer had grabbed a fistful of hair along with the chain and the microchip wound burned and it hurt to turn his neck, hurt even to draw breath.

"Leave his hands and his eyes," Colin said, talking to Dwyer but staring down at Q. "For all his _deficiencies_, he's smart, and I'm sure he'll choose to cooperate."

Dwyer dragged Q to his feet with the chain. Colin came closer, tentatively, bouncing from foot to foot like a boxer. His hand shot out and swiped Q's glasses; a fingernail caught Q on the bridge of his nose.

As Dwyer hooked the chain around a ceiling pipe fitting, hauling Q up like a side of meat until he had to stand on his toes or be strangled, Colin held Q's glasses up to the light and shook his head like a disapproving grandmother.

"Filthy." He polished them with his tie.

Dwyer pulled a plastic zip tie from his jacket and bound Q's hands. Q felt a thin line of blood trickle from under the bandage, between his shoulder blades and down his spine.

"I'm sorry it had to come to this," Colin said, almost mournfully.

"Liar," Q snarled soundlessly, teeth biting off the word.

Colin's lips curled and it was the devil, not the cherub, that Q saw.

* * *

**Author's notes:**

_"Imagine my surprise when I discovered that Ben Rossum never graduated from Cambridge."_

I took Q's real name from Ben Whishaw, the actor who portrays him, and Guido van Rossum, the author of the Python programming language (the only programming language I know anything about!). Python is open source, which I think young!Q would appreciate.

_Penny slicing_

Anyone who's seen _Office Space_ will be familiar with this scheme.


	7. Bond does some off-the-clock snooping

**Seven. Bond does some off-the-clock snooping.**

As Bond picked the lock on the front door of Q's flat, he played a mental tape of Mallory, sitting behind his desk with his best _I'm-not-angry-just-disappointed_ face, saying in his professional monotone that _unauthorized entry into Q's flat was not strictly relevant to the current situation_. He would say it just like that. _Not strictly relevant_. _She_ would have been mad as hell and not afraid to show it, and she would have asked him what the devil he thought he was playing at. He would have told her that he had a hunch, and she would have said _that's not good enough_. And he would have ignored her and done it anyway, but he would have had at least a couple of second thoughts.

Bond spent significant chunks of his life operating on instinct; it could be honed with practice, like any other sense, and he had come to trust it as firmly as he trusted his heart to beat through the night when he fell asleep. He had no idea what he might find inside Q's flat to clue them in to his current location or the identity of his captor. Rafferty wasn't the brains, if he didn't even wear gloves at a crime scene. No, he had been in it for the money.

_(This lil' bird is worth a pretty sum.)_

He could not say if the mystery villain wanted Q because he was head of Q branch (_not likely – how could he know that?_) or if he knew Q from his life outside the office (_also not likely – Q had no life outside the office_), or if he knew Q from his pre-Q criminal days (_he refused to verify the presence of accomplices_). Perhaps this wasn't solely about Q, but about MI6, and what they had done when they made a twenty-three-year-old trade his talents for a nominal freedom.

The instant he shut the door, he heard a man's voice from somewhere deep in the flat:

"_His familiarity had the ring of such genuine good nature that Peter Petrovich thought better of it and began to feel encouraged; perhaps in part because this impudent tramp had had sense enough to introduce himself as a former student."_

All the lights were out. No movement. One hand on his gun, Bond crept through the living room, keeping his back to the wall. He swept the kitchen, peered into the broom closet; the voice went on with no change in volume.

Two bedrooms, on opposite sides of the hallway, with a bathroom between them. Bond's first thought was to make for the right-hand room – the doorknob glinted with two different light sources, one blue, one red, both blinking in time, and the whole room emitted an electrical glow – but the voice spilled out from the left-hand side.

Bond glanced through the gap between the hinges, saw no one hiding behind the door, and nudged his way in. A double bed unadorned by headboard or footboard, comforter crumpled at the foot; a floor-to-ceiling bookshelf double-stacked with computing textbooks and well-worn paperbacks; a closet, door standing open, revealing a couple of neatly pressed suits and a dresser with cardigans poking out of half-closed drawers; teacups and pens and various litter strewn about the floor; and a stereo system on a low table near the radiator, numbers counting up the seconds as an audio track played.

"_He made a hasty attempt to figure out what it all meant. The silence went on for a minute or so. Meanwhile Raskolnikov –"_

On top of the CD changer, a plastic case with a label from the London Library. _Crime and Punishment_, read by an actor Bond had never heard of.

He smiled, in recognition of a move well played. "Cheeky."

Now that he knew what he was looking for, it took him five minutes to find it: a tiny plastic microphone and transmitter, no bigger than his smallest fingernail, painted white to match the spot atop the doorframe where it had been concealed. No camera. It would be the same in every room.

Having established that he was alone, and that MI6 probably already knew that he had broken into Q's flat, Bond abandoned stealth and took a thorough inventory of the place. It smelled strongly of coffee and old books and some sort of sharp, waxy air freshener. Two sellotaped posters – Doctor Who and Astonishing X-Men – faced each other across the hallway on the opposing bedroom doors. None of the furniture matched; the sofa had been covered with a red fleece throw to hide stains. The refrigerator was mostly empty, but the kitchen garbage was full of food-flecked Styrofoam containers. A teacup on the table had been jammed with packets of sauces and salad dressings from various takeaways, and the kid had more tea boxes and coffee mixes than Bond had known existed. Had he not known who lived here, he would have guessed a young accountant or actuary, fresh out of university, too busy or too lazy to cook, not yet making enough money to hire an interior decorator. Certainly not the head of the Secret Service's department of technology.

But there were clues. Cables, secured by industrial staples, ran along the walls of the hallway and living room like a modern art installation. The living room had a wall-mounted flat-screen and an impressive collection of gaming systems, one vintage, the rest modern, most of them bearing signs of tampering. When Bond passed directly in front of the TV, which he had skirted his first time through, a tiny light flashed and the screen lit up with an attractive display of weather, headlines, and a scrolling stock ticker.

"Good afternoon," the television said, in a gentle female voice. "What can I do for you today?"

Bond could only shake his head and mutter, "Kid's made himself a lady friend."

Most of the cables fed into the second bedroom, the room that glowed. Stepping inside was like entering a different building entirely.

Computers – or the disemboweled shells and scattered innards of computers – crouched in every corner, on every flat surface. A modem occupied a place of prominence atop a stack of unopened reams of printer paper. On a drafting table, beside a rotating fan that would be necessary in the summer to keep all the equipment from overheating, three different tablets pulsed with the same blue screensaver. The far wall had been covered in some thin sheet of plastic that turned the entire surface into a dry-erase board, which the kid had filled with equations and arrows and multi-colored lines of code that meant nothing to Bond. Sticky notes and thumbtacked notebook pages dotted the other walls with no apparent organization. This room, cramped with machines and overrun by wires and humming with some vital energy, reminded Bond of a magazine article he had once skimmed comparing a computer's central processing unit to the human brain.

A soft noise drew his attention. Two steady green lights nestled in a desk chair, which he had taken for another device, were the eyes of a smoky-gray cat that regarded him with mingled contempt and caution. Belatedly, Bond registered the food dish he had stepped over in the kitchen, the litter box behind the bathroom door.

He held out a hand, and the cat deigned to sniff his fingers. A tiny pink tongue flicked out and scraped the pad of his thumb, gone as soon as it registered, like the flash of a fish just below the water's surface.

His mobile vibrated. Even that small sound was frighteningly loud in the near-silence of the apartment, but the cat merely blinked; electronic noises were probably just as familiar as his master's voice.

"Bond."

"Stop looking for Q's diary or whatever you're doing and get back here." It was Tanner, and he sounded excited.

"What's –"

"McGovern picked up the guy who left fingerprints all over that construction office. You're the only one who actually spoke to the kidnapper, so we need you to ID his voice."

"Cockney?"

"Thick."

Bond was already out the door, ignoring the cat's meow and the television's query ("What can I do for you?") and the audiobook that played through the long, lonely day for whoever had been assigned to listen:

"_He realized he was still weak, but his most powerful inward effort had brought him to a point of calm, the point of a fixed idea, and given him strength and self-confidence."_

* * *

**Author's notes:**

The three quotes Bond listens to come from the 1968 Sidney Monas translation of _Crime and Punishment_, Part Two, chapter five._C&P_ is a great book and I highly recommend it. It's also great for illustrating Q's rather... pointed sense of humor.


	8. The mind is the sharpest tool

**Eight. The mind is the sharpest tool.**

Q could not be certain how much time had passed. Without his glasses he couldn't read the clock.

Dwyer had started with a few blows to the face, knocked his head sideways so the chain cut below the jaw, burst his lower lip like rotten fruit against his teeth. The split had congealed and reopened twice – so perhaps twenty minutes. More than enough time to come up with a plan, even if every stroke of the riding crop scattered his thoughts like papers caught in a draft. His heart blotched black at the edges of his eyes, thumped in his ears almost loud enough to block out the cracks, keeping time between each blow. Any longer and he might lose an essential piece.

"All right," he said, or tried to say – it was hard to work his voice out around the chain.

Colin had been leaning against the wall for the duration, spinning Q's glasses by the earpiece and occasionally checking his mobile. He stepped forward and cupped a hand behind his ear. "What was that?"

Dwyer paused. Q took as much of a breath as he could and tried again. "I said all right, I'll do it."

"Excellent." Q could hear the grin in Colin's voice, recognize the way he straightened his shoulders and strode to the table with purpose. "Let him down and bring him here."

The chain rattled and suddenly gave way; Q slumped and scrambled for balance before his knees touched the floor. There were satisfactions he would not give.

Dwyer seized an arm, dragged him to the table, and dumped him in a chair. Colin stood opposite and pressed a few keys on the laptop. Q took measured breaths, clenched and relaxed his fists, imagined the pain balled in the palm of his hand, something he could crush and compress until it was so tiny as to be meaningless. _But,_ his traitorous intelligence reminded him, _it's at the quantum level that we address the mysteries of the universe. The smallest particles have the greatest meaning. _

Colin came around the table and slid Q's glasses back onto his face. The right earpiece jabbed at his wound and Q jerked his head away. He felt a tiny shift of his chair; Dwyer stood warningly at his shoulder, one hand on the seat back.

Colin passed Q the laptop and sprawled in the other chair, legs apart and one arm flung over the back like a beachgoer lounging in the sun. A long minute passed where they looked at each other with increasing impatience. Colin's eyebrows migrated farther and farther up his forehead.

_Well?_ he mouthed, gesturing at the computer.

Pointedly Q held up his hands, which were still tied at the wrists.

Colin huffed and nodded at Dwyer, who flicked open the knife; Q's brain scrolled through second thoughts faster than a computer executing code, but Dwyer dexterously slipped the blade between Q's wrists and slit the zip tie without making a scratch.

The plastic had left welts, left his fingers pale and painful. Q rolled his wrists and rubbed his palms together and waited for the tingling to subside.

"The problem is in the transfers," Colin said, and Q had been so focused on his plan that it took him a moment to remember what Colin had asked him to do. "The system is designed to be suspicious of too many wire transfers to the same account over a certain period of time. I've got multiple accounts, of course, but needing to make several thousand is excessive, don't you think?"

"How dare we make you work to steal."

The mirth vanished from Colin's eyes. "Don't act righteous, Ben."

Q fought down an instinct to keep his eyes on the predator and scrolled through the code Colin had pulled up on the screen. It was his, or at least the base – someone had modified it, clumsily, added patches specific to Barclays. About halfway down he stopped, deleted a handful of lines, and, with a false frown of concentration, carefully retyped everything he had just cut, character for character. Dwyer didn't react. Good – the man knew nothing about code.

In increments he investigated the computer, growing bolder each time Dwyer failed to question. He was almost certain it was Colin's personal laptop: wear on the casing indicated it had been handled regularly; the hinges were a little loose; several of the keys had smooth patches the size of a fingertip. All files had been encrypted. Internet connection had been disabled, but Q knew all sorts of tricks for unlocking adapters, filtering the strongest signal, cracking passwords. He pulled up the control panel and examined the hardware. Then he tried the device manager, then the control panel again, just to make sure, to try to fight the panic.

The wireless adapter had been physically removed from the computer.

It had been stupid, really, to think Colin would allow him a connection to the outside world; here again was his tendency to assume other people were not as smart as he was, and how could he have made this mistake with _Colin,_ of all people?

Something gave his panic away – they knew each other too well, another mistake, old and painful – and Colin smiled his mischievous, hungry smile.

"Don't worry, Ben, I'm prepared to sit here all night while you solve this one." He pulled his mobile from his pocket and unlocked the screen. "I've got plenty to keep myself occupied – Caribbean islands to scout, that sort of thing. This is the one I've got my eye on." On the mobile he flashed Q a quick glimpse of bone-white sand and glassy sea, and seeing that sliver of Colin's escape slotted the pieces into place for Q's.

The folder he wanted was on the front page of the control panel. _Configure this computer's Bluetooth capabilities._ Q opened another window and began to type.

Gradually a lull fell over the room – a strange, disarming peace. Colin had been watching Q with his chin drooping towards his chest, eyes peering from beneath his brows like an animal looking out from a cave, but a light flashed on his mobile and he allowed it to distract him, first only for a few seconds, then for a minute, then for several. Dwyer stepped away from Q's chair and paced aimlessly behind him. The familiarity of typing and the fuzziness of pain lured Q closer and closer to a trance, to the narrowing of reality he sometimes experienced when he was deep in a project, where time and the workings of the outside world ceased to matter and he emerged astonished that they had continued without him. Every few minutes he forced himself to stop and take inventory: gauge Colin's level of attentiveness, listen for Dwyer's footfalls, check the time blinking forward in the corner of the computer screen. This was a delicate security.

And it would have to be broken soon for his plan to work. This would be the most dangerous part, the balancing act – to draw Colin's attention without provoking any more pain, or shattering Colin's tenuous trust that Q was as good as his word.

It hurt to sit up straight, but it hurt to rest against the chair back. Q leaned against the edge of the table, bracing most of his weight on his elbows. "So much for not having me harmed," he muttered.

Colin shrugged. "I think you earned it." He glanced away from his mobile just long enough to give Q a chastising look. "That order was mostly a test for Rafferty. He lacks finesse. I mean, a head wound, _really_ – he could have broken your neck and cost me millions."

"How much _did_ you pay him?" Q asked lightly, an offhand curiosity.

"Five hundred thousand," Colin replied, just as casually.

Q glanced up over his glasses and blinked as though fending off tears, feigning hurt. "Half a million? That's all I'm worth to you?"

Colin dropped his head sideways against his shoulder with another of his secretive smiles. "Actually, I think half a million quid is a very expensive corpse."

Q's finger twitched on the touch pad and deleted his last five lines of code.

"What?" Colin's incredulity made Q feel ashamed, ashamed of his fear of death, ashamed of how much must have shown on his face. "You didn't think I could let you live, did you? I told you everything. If I let you go, what's to stop you from phoning the police, walking to the nearest internet café, and undoing everything you're working on right now? I did try to be fair – I did tell you we'd never see each other again."

"Let me tell _you_ something." Q braced his hands on either side of the computer and leaned forward over the screen. He noted, with a strange detachment, that he was trembling – _Oh, that's interesting; maybe it's pain, maybe it's fear._ "I work for _MI6_. They're ruthless with anyone who touches one of their own. I don't care if you have accounts in –" He glanced at Colin's code. "– Russia, Switzerland, _and_ Jamaica – there is _no place you can go_ where they can't find you."

"Hmm." Colin had a look that could make you feel like a laboratory specimen, like you were about to be dissected as soon as he determined where to make the first incision. "Did they teach you to say that? They _have_ trained you well."

The dismissive tone touched a trigger that froze Q for an instant: a Pavlovian flash of emotions he had not experienced in that particular combination in a long time. But he remembered every inch of their architecture – defensiveness and anger plastered over hurt, and, at the foundation, a gnawing, pathetic need to be liked, to clutch at the little clods of friendship he had been thrown – and he understood how carefully Colin had constructed them, how he had tried to cement his control.

This could not be allowed to distract him. He must be the one doing the distracting. But Colin was still talking.

"Rafferty told me that when he dug the microchip out of your neck, you called it 'felony destruction of government property.' They do keep you on a short leash, don't they? They don't trust you at all." He set the mobile aside, finally, and folded his arms across his chest. "I bet you told them everything when they caught you."

_Deny and distract_. Q enabled Bluetooth. He had been right about it being Colin's personal computer; the laptop recognized the phone immediately. _Deny and distract_. "What makes you think they ever caught me?"

"Please. They wouldn't microchip just anyone – in fact, I think that's illegal. They'd never do it to anyone who was in a position to tell." Colin looked as though he expected confirmation, but Q had just located the mobile GPS, and there was no torture that would convince him to share with Colin any more of his secrets. "No, they found you, and you sang. 'Forgive me, father, for I have sinned.' Hmm? I bet you even told them about me – for all the good that clearly did, since I'm free as a bird and you're the one being monitored by the government. And you know why? You know why no one has ever arrested me, or even suspected me of being involved in all the little schemes we had together?"

Another pause that demanded acknowledgement. Q looked up as his mouse hit _Run_ on the first batch of code.

"Because of you." Colin's eyes were locked on Q's face, hungry for the emotions he expected to draw out, emotions Q was determined not to show. "You remember the row we had right before I moved out of our flat?"

A new window popped up on Q's screen. Characters flew by faster than he could read them, but he knew what they were, and a tiny amount of tension left his shoulders. "I remember telling you that you ought to use hacking for some bigger purpose than stealing money and playing the stock market. And yet here we are."

"And I'm sure you remember what you did to punish me when you found out you'd be paying the rent on your own."

"Of course. And, you know, until today I was steadily moving towards a point where I might have someday regretted it."

Colin's expression was composed, but a muscle jumped in his jaw; when he spoke he moved his mouth as little as possible, as though he could barely control what came out. "You stole everything from me. Three million pounds. I'm not going to pretend I'm not still sore about it." Then a cock of the head, and the smile returned, razor-sharp. "But really, I should be thanking you, because by taking that money you removed the most damning piece of evidence against me." He looked up at an imaginary authority and his voice became deferential, his face sickeningly innocent. "'But sir, if I really am a thief, then where's the money?'"

Q felt hatred with an intensity that rendered him mute.

"You still had it when they caught you, didn't you? And I'm sure that you covered your tracks well. There was no connection between your accounts and mine. No way for them to know that it came from me. Only your word. And what's the word of a criminal worth, anyway? What's the word of a little orphan boy on scholarship, desperate for attention and playing at Robin Hood, with only the praises of a couple of batty instructors to recommend him, against the word of a young gentleman from Eton and a respectable family, wealthy parents supporting him, bright future, no need to steal or revenge himself on anyone?"

A few years ago the words would have cut deeper, but time and anger had armored Q, and as he looked over his work one final time he felt the plates shifting beneath them, felt the foundation crack. Two clicks – _Send_, then _Run_ – and Colin's mobile lit up obediently and all the strain left him, replaced by a heady rush of power.

He faced Colin with immovable calm. "But that's exactly why you did it."

A beat. Finally he had thrown out something Colin had not predicted. "What?"

"That's why you needed the hacking, and the securities fraud, and even all those women I recall you sleeping with – because you came to Cambridge expecting everyone to recognize how _special_ you are and instead a _little boy_ with a state education and a last name no one recognizes was standing in your spotlight."

Anger distorted Colin's face, made him old and ugly, and Q wondered how he had ever believed that this creature was a sympathetic being, how it could possibly pass among people undetected and thriving.

"Your father works at Barclays, doesn't he? That solves the mystery of how you got such a good job at such a young age." Q narrowed his eyes, snakelike. "I work for MI6 because I'm very good at what I do – so good, in fact, that they couldn't afford for me to go to prison. So now I have a new life, while you'll have to sit awake nights wondering if I was really as careful as you think."

With effort, Colin simmered down the anger. "I know you were. You wanted a clean break. They don't have a thing on me."

"I'm rectifying that right now."

Silence – the loudest that Q had ever heard. Dwyer had stopped pacing, and for a heavy moment nothing moved except the code flying by on Q's screen and a tiny animation looping on Colin's mobile and the second hand of the clock ticking off time like a bomb.

Then panic bloomed in Colin's eyes, and, _God,_ it was gratifying to be the source of that emotion instead of its sufferer. He snatched the laptop, spun it around and looked at the screen, and his teeth bared like an animal, fingers curled into claws as they scrambled for his mobile.

"What _the_ _fuck_ did you do?"

"Exactly what you brought me here to do," Q said, placid. "Hack."

Colin swiped the screen with his index finger, jabbed at some buttons, then resorted to shaking the phone as though he could flick the malicious code off like a fly. His chest heaved, his eyes corroded, but Q felt insulated. That fury had no hold over him now.

"You – little – _shit_." For the first time, Colin's voice shook – but he collected himself with the speed of a man accustomed to giving orders and having them followed without question. "Tell me _exactly_ what you've done and how I can fix it. _Now_."

"I've infected your mobile with a little creation of mine. Quite simple, really. All it does is gather the personal information you've got stored on your phone, combine and convert it to text, and post it to as many public internet forums as it can find. And since you seem to use your mobile for everything, billions of internet users now know your name, address, mobile number, banking information, email and social media passwords, driver's license and National Health Service numbers, and the login information for every porn site you've ever visited. Within minutes you will be the victim of identity theft, but since you've been using your bank accounts for a variety of illegal activities, I seriously doubt you want the credit card company – or the police – taking a closer look at your finances." Q paused for breath and to savor Colin's look of impotent rage. "And by the way, your data charges this month will be astronomical. Sorry."

Colin hovered a finger threateningly over one button, like a cartoon villain with a detonator. "All I have to do is shut down my phone."

"By my calculations, your information is being disseminated at a speed of two hundred posts per second, meaning we've hit at least forty thousand forums by this point. And the program is smart enough to target forums based on the number of hits they've received in the past week. Think about the type of person who uses the internet most frequently, and consider whether you would trust them with your age, sex, and location, let alone your entire life."

Now it was Colin who was trembling. He flung the phone across the table; it struck Q's collarbone and he caught it against his chest. "Fix it."

Q shrugged. "I can't. Even if I remove the code, I can't possibly delete all the posts." He glanced from left to right and then leaned in a little, as though telling a secret. "I've also contacted MI6. They know our current coordinates. Shortly you will be surrounded by men with guns who would like nothing more than an excuse to take your head off your shoulders."

This time the silence was shattered by Colin's breathing, great gasping pants like a caged bull desperate to knock off its rider. He too had leaned forward against the table, drawn as if by a magnet, and everything hung still around them as though this was all that existed: two men at a table, with a computer and a mobile and a friendship turned to enmity, and Q thought again of quantum particles and the ripples of their tiniest interactions.

Then something changed in Colin – a realization struck, and his anger drained away like water rushing from a bathtub. He tipped his head back and ran his hands over his face as though rearranging his features, and when he looked back at Q his eyes flashed with a dangerous thrill.

"Forgive me for not applauding your cleverness." His voice had smoothed. "Since you know our location, you know that we're forty-five minutes from MI6 headquarters."

Q clenched one hand around Colin's mobile and curled the other into a fist in his lap to hide the quiver that had run through him like a reflex. "They'll do it in thirty. Beating the odds is sort of their job."

"Hmm." Colin reached over with steady hands – Q's pride would not allow him to flinch – and grabbed the phone from Q. He took in the screen, tapped a few keys. "You sent this –" Eyebrows went up in surprise. "– not even eight minutes ago. Well, there's your cards."

For a second Q's mind went blank, as though it were trying to protect him from the impending terror – but this dread could not be warded, it gripped him by the throat and he thought his heart might stop –

_Not such a clever boy._

Colin leaned his chin on his hand. "So I have at least twenty – probably more like thirty-five – minutes. Just you and me and Dwyer."

And his grin spread like an oil slick.


	9. A little interrogation

**Nine. A little interrogation.**

Tanner had installed Rafferty in a high-security cell, bulletproof glass and cameras on all sides, automated doors secured with retina-display locks and classified passwords. Excessive, Bond thought, especially because Rafferty wasn't smart enough to be intimidated. He'd probably think this was a recognition of his power, a classification of Hannibal-Lecter-like danger.

When Bond opened the outer door, the prisoner was examining his handcuffs, poking at the joints as though he might be able to break them with a fingernail. He looked up as Bond approached the glass.

"I wanna see a lawyer."

"That's nice."

Bond circled the cage slowly, face pensive, enjoying the way Rafferty twisted in his chair to keep Bond always in his sight.

On Bond's third lap, Rafferty snapped, "I ain't sayin' nothin' till I sees a lawyer."

"You were very talkative before."

Rafferty's forehead crumpled in confusion. "What're yeh talkin' about?"

Bond stopped pacing, put his hands in his trouser pockets, swaggered up close to the glass. "We had a little chat over the headset while you were perpetrating a kidnapping. It was all going very well for you and you thought you'd take the time to rub it in, like a bad serial villain."

Perhaps Rafferty knew he was a bad actor, or perhaps the impulse to flaunt his power was too strong; he dropped all pretenses and gave a toothy grin. "It _were_ a pretty sweet job, weren't it? Now I can tell all my friends abou' th' time I took down a car fulla secret agents. No better recommendation in my line o' work."

Oh, he was going to love this. "Congratulations. You've hit the big time." One eye scan and one entered passcode and he was inside the cell, locked in with the little fish. "Are you ready to begin?"

Rafferty wasn't quite scared, not yet, but he braced his feet and sat up straighter. "Begin wha'?"

Bond leaned back against the glass and undid his cufflinks. "The part where you tell me who paid you and what you did with the man you took. Eventually you'll also have to say how you planned this, but that can wait until we find out if we've got you for kidnapping or for accessory to murder."

"It ain't my business to know what they want 'im for." Rafferty looked insulted; the expression wrinkled his nose like a pig. "I deliver, I get paid. I stay outta th' killin', if there's any."

Bond rolled his eyes. "Of course you do. Can't be a gentleman criminal if your hands are bloody."

"Aw, don' gimme that," Rafferty scoffed. "Yer a spy, ain't ya? Ever killed anyone? Ever get thrown in prison fer it?" His tongue worked at the gap in his teeth, around his growing smile, as he waited for an affirmation and received none. "Didn' think so. A bloke's gotta follow 'is own code in a world like ours."

Bond flashed him a smirk like light glinting off a knife's edge. "I have no illusions about who I am. But apparently you do."

Nervousness, as it should be. "I ain't followin'."

Bond slithered out of his jacket, unnoosed his tie, let them both fall to the floor like shed snakeskin. "Apparently you think you don't need to be scared of me. I haven't seen a proper demonstration of fear from you yet." He curled back his sleeves with the dexterity of a lifelong smoker rolling another cigarette, and Rafferty's eyes followed like a hypnotist's patsy. "And apparently you don't understand just _who_ has you captive, and –" Behind the chair now, one hand almost friendly on Rafferty's shoulder, leaning in close enough to smell his sweat. "– how little they will care if a few flies get squashed."

The loose skin below Rafferty's jaw quivered. "You got a million quid?" he asked, and his voice wasn't shaking quite as much as Bond would have liked.

"Excuse me?"

"Pay up an' I'll tell yeh everythin'." And then his final mistake: "I already made almost half a mil offa th' kid, why not –"

The impact of his head made the glass vibrate in a shuddering circle, left behind a squelch of blood. He moaned in a way that could not be faked, and Bond felt no sympathy.

"Yeh mental –" His voice drained down to a gasp. "I didn' 'urt th' kid, I swear –"

Bond flipped him with a kick, hard enough to feel the gaps between ribs through the toe of his shoe, and stomped down on a hand until the man screamed. The cage trapped and reverberated the sound, rang like a crystal until Bond's head filled with it.

Over the noise he growled, "Welcome to the big time."

Rafferty's free hand clawed at Bond's leg – pitiful, really, so easy to snatch it and twist, put just enough pressure on the joints to make him squeal.

"I gave 'im to Dwyer! Bloke's name is Dwyer. Big guy, military, yeh know? Not much o' a talker."

Bond leaned close enough to see his image refracted in Rafferty's gathering tears. "And that's all you know about him?"

"I tol' yeh –" It was almost a sob. "I don' ask no questions."

There was something else Bond had to know, something that gnawed every time he replayed their conversation: "You called me 007 – why?"

"Tha's what th' kid calls yeh, innit? I 'eard it, I opened th' door an' he said, 'Double-oh-sev'n' in 'is lil' ear thing –"

Who, then? Who knew they would be out in the field, and where, and when?

The door hissed open and Bond met Tanner's gaze through the glass. His eyes traveled over the blood smear and the sprawled Rafferty and Bond's reddening knuckles and he nodded in approval, so tiny it could be mistaken for a twitch. Bond thanked him with an equally small smile.

Then Tanner cleared his throat and reverted to protocol. Impeccable, as always. "Mr. Bond," he said, "Q branch just got a delivery that you probably want to see."

* * *

They were waiting for him in the central hub, at a bank of screens similar to the one where Bond had first seen the kid at work, untangling code that he called _beautiful_ and Bond called _dangerous_. This time, instead of a cardigan and disheveled dark hair, the sliding door revealed a white lab coat and a mane of untamable blond curls.

"This is Holly Mason," Mallory explained, from off to the side. "She's the number two here in Q branch."

Holly automatically wiped a hand on her clothes and stuck it out for him to shake. "Double-oh-seven."

Bond surveyed her again with greater interest. Short and curvy, closer to his age than to Q's. Conservatively dressed except for her shoes, a pair of red Converse trainers. Little makeup, clipped fingernails. And a gold ring, well-worn, fourth finger of her left hand; when her hands were not busy at the computer, she toyed with it compulsively, rubbing a red patch into the skin beneath. Neither she nor Mallory had given him more than a glance, instead focusing on the text of an email that Holly had pulled up on the center screen.

_cburns wrote:_

_51.4832, -0.412374_

_Two sugars._

_Q._

_- Sent from my mobile device_

"And you're certain it's from him?" M looked at Holly.

"Yes." Nothing wavered, not her eyes, not her voice.

"How can you be sure?" Bond asked.

She nodded at the screen as though that might clarify which part he was supposed to be looking at. "Two sugars. That's how I take my coffee. He thinks I'm pathetic because I can't drink it black." Bond rolled his eyes – sounded like the kid, all right. "Even if whoever's got him is asking questions about MI6, I can't imagine why they'd need to know what his chief of staff puts in her coffee."

Bond muttered, "You'd be surprised." Holly shot him a little irritable glance and he realized that she, like most of her department, did not wholly trust field agents.

Mallory scrubbed the back of his hand across his forehead; he looked tremendously tired. "Even if they're baiting us, we've got to go in."

Bond asked, "Go where?" but Holly had already opened a satellite map, already cut and pasted the coordinates from the beginning of the message. A blue marker popped up over western London and she zoomed in dizzyingly fast, streets and trees and rat-maze suburbs rushing towards them from below.

"Looks like… out by Heathrow. Cranford." The image jumped to street view – a slightly dingy neighborhood, pavement erratically patched, weeds poking through the cracks. Their marker hovered over a square brick office block with a temp agency on one corner and Dwyer Protection Services on the other, two vacant shopfronts between.

Bond took a step closer to the screen. "Dwyer. That little Cockney shit down in level six sold Q to someone named Dwyer."

Holly said, "He's probably a middle man." She must have interpreted the look Bond gave her as disbelieving, or perhaps Mallory was showing skepticism over Bond's shoulder, because she explained: "Look at the sender – C. Burns at Barclays Bank. Q's got control of his email address, but the message was sent from a smartphone. I seriously doubt this C. Burns handed Q his personal phone – since they targeted him specifically I'm assuming they know what he can do, and even if they didn't they'll know by now because he can't keep his damn mouth shut –" Even Mallory's lips twitched at that. "– so Q's accessing his mobile via another device. But he doesn't have internet connectivity on this other device, or else he wouldn't have to hack someone else's email. Easiest way would be Bluetooth, but since Bluetooth operates on radio waves the two devices have to be in line of sight, no more than eight meters. So C. Burns is in the same room with him –" Bond opened his mouth, but she shushed him with a raised finger. "– Not just C. Burns but C. Burns at _Barclays Bank_, which makes him a brilliant candidate for mastermind by socioeconomic status alone. He'll have the money to arrange a kidnapping."

"And the ego," Bond contributed.

"Well, that goes without saying." Holly huffed and rolled her eyes and Bond decided that he quite liked her.

Mallory rose from his chair. "Get me everything you can on Dwyer Protection Services and this C. Burns, and call up Gorman and Vickers, issue them guns and transportation."

"My pleasure, sir." Holly crooked a finger at two men sharing a long desk near the far wall; they came immediately to her side and she issued orders with a low voice and large gestures.

Bond never minced words, but for once he wanted on Mallory's good side, wanted to convey his desire for action in a way that wouldn't sound like the revenge it was – so he paused and thought carefully and watched.

And maybe his silence impressed Mallory, or maybe M had made up his mind long before, because Holly produced a gun and a transmitter and an earpiece just for him.

Their eyes met and M said, "Go get him, Mr. Bond. Holly and I will be with you in your ear."

* * *

**Author's notes:**

_51.4832, -0.412374_

These coordinates actually refer to a public park near Heathrow - or so Google Maps tells me.


	10. Gets worse before it gets better

Hello again, friend of a friend  
I knew you when  
Our common goal was waiting for the world to end  
Now that the truth is just a rule that you can bend  
You crack the whip  
Shape-shift and trick  
The past again

- Metric, "Black Sheep"

* * *

**Ten. Gets worse before it gets better.**

This time they didn't bother stringing him from the ceiling. Dwyer yanked him out of the chair with the chain, yanked so hard that his throat closed and darkness swarmed over him, and when it retreated only seconds later Q half-wished it would come back.

This time he was on the floor so there were no punches, but there were kicks and more strokes from the riding crop, and if he ever crawled too far away Dwyer pulled him up short with the chain like an animal tamer reining in an unruly creature.

This time Q didn't bother trying to read the clock, because he knew that if he saw how slowly the minutes were moving he might feel despair.

"That's enough."

Colin stood over him, detached, as if Q interested him no more than a bit of paperwork, an unpleasant but necessary part of the day, quickly dispensed with. But deep down, a flicker of some long-caged emotion, a curiosity – and a minute fear of himself, of what would happen if he loosed all his restraints, and this frightened Q more than any amount of anger.

"Go watch the street and signal me if our guests arrive," Colin said to Dwyer, his eyes on Q. He waited for several interminable seconds after Dwyer's steps faded from the stairs, and then he said, "Get up."

Q tried. His legs had been mostly untouched, but his back burned and his brain seemed incapable of coordinating his muscles. And he didn't _want_ to get up, not really – he had worked so hard to disobey every order Colin had given him, but a craven part of him hated this pain and pled with his better nature to do anything, anything to make it stop.

Colin got tired of waiting and pulled out his chair. Q made one last attempt to gain a footing, but his ankle turned beneath him and he fell sideways, against Colin's legs, jarring the chair backward an inch or two. Colin sighed, as though Q were a small child who had disappointed him in some minor way.

"Now you've got blood on my slacks. At least they're not the expensive ones."

Touching him was repulsive. Q scooted away, but Colin grabbed the chain, right at the back of his neck. Roughly he seized a fistful of hair – and then, with a gentleness that Q didn't even try to comprehend, he tipped Q's head back to rest on his lap. For a minute they simply looked at each other. The tip of Colin's tongue dabbed at the corners of his mouth.

"Give me your hand."

Q didn't understand, at first; then a hungry, toying smirk bloomed over Colin's face and everything inside him howled, _get away, get away_ –

Colin said, "I'll be nice and let you choose which one."

Nothing would move. Not his legs, not his arms, not his beaten back, just his heart pounding in his exposed neck, and he felt so betrayed by his own body, not even losing Colin's friendship years ago had stung this badly –

Colin sighed, again, in the same way. He picked up the knife from the table and poised it directly above Q's face.

"You really only need one eye for programming, don't you?"

He moved the blade back and forth, mouth puckered and brow furrowed like a child choosing between two equally appealing candies in a bowl of treats.

Q shut his eyes and hated himself and raised his left hand.

Colin took it by the wrist. "Good boy." He propped Q's arm against the edge of the table and scooted forward in the chair, knees jabbing against the sensitive spots on Q's shoulders, sending fireworks scattering across Q's vision. Q felt smooth fingers undo his cuff and roll his sleeve up past the elbow.

Faintly he heard Colin say, "Felony destruction of government property, hmm?" and then the blade entered him just below the joint and pain came fresh and thoughts deserted.

* * *

Time was meaningless. Time was precious. It had no measure but every brief experience of it was another instant that he was still alive. Q breathed and burned and bled, each fragile pulse washing the wounds with more blood. It soaked into his rolled sleeve, ran down his arm and dripped from the point of his elbow to the floor. His fingers had gone numb.

A pattern. Colin was marking some kind of pattern into his arm. Words.

Then Colin let out a deep breath and leaned back; perhaps he had taken the knife away, but the pain was so great that it didn't matter. He took hold of Q's hair and pulled his head up, shoved his glasses back onto his face so he could see his damaged arm, still supported by the table edge.

"Well? What do you think?"

The smeared blood and his fading focus made it difficult to identify most of the letters. The back of his hand, the newest, brightest cuts, read _MI6_. For another indeterminate interval Q stared at this with fascination and horror. So much of his life had been lived in anonymity – the Cambridge kid discussing the prosecution of cybercrime with instructors unaware that he was the unknown in the headline MASTERMIND OF SIS HACKING REMAINS UNIDENTIFIED; the young London tech geek commuting with dozens of people who never suspected they were sharing a Tube car with one of the most dangerous men in Britain; the single-letter embodiment of an MI6 department, surrounded by colleagues who could never call him what his grandmother had called him because that name was now a state secret. In another time he and Colin had carried this secret together, and laughed about it. A news report on telly in a pub – "Server outages strike Department of Justice website" – and Colin would lean against his shoulder and whisper, "Was that you?" The person at the next booth would spread out the paper, run a finger along MILLIONS LOSE MILLIONS IN SECURITIES FRAUD, and Colin would kick him under the table and they would smile into their drinks.

Now any feelings of empathy between them were gone, but there was one power Colin still held, a simple knowledge.

The letters told the truth:

_Property of MI6_.

"The Romans used to brand thieves and slaves on a visible part of the body so everyone would know exactly who and what they were dealing with," Colin was saying from far away. "They liked the hand and forearm, but they also liked the face – you should consider yourself lucky I didn't choose _that_."

Q felt his spine curling towards the floor. His arm slipped off the table and his knuckles knocked against concrete with a spike of pain that almost made him vomit. His head pounded and he saw, between blinks, like a series of stills, Colin setting down the knife, Colin kneeling beside him, Colin reaching for his throat. Something clicked and Colin pulled the chain away, and this was probably the end, because he wasn't enough of a threat to require restraint anymore –

Then from outside there came a tremendous bang, and Colin leapt to his feet as though he had never heard a gunshot before – which, upon reflection, maybe he hadn't. Q closed his eyes as far as he dared and channeled all his energy into listening. A car door slamming, male voices – two, three? – shouting indistinguishable words.

"That shit Dwyer –" Colin snapped, but Q could hear the tremor in his throat.

Through the slits of his eyes Q saw Colin step towards him with the knife, but then a crash from above made the door latch rattle, and Colin froze deerlike for only a second before springing to the table and snatching up his briefcase. The heel of his shoe slipped in the blood on the floor, and he stumbled, cursing – and then the hinges squealed and he was gone, just as another crash opened the room upstairs and let the voices in.

"No one here –"

"Check the basement."

"Oy! Outside!"

The voices retreated. Q tasted rust and metal, throat stuck like the lock of an ancient gate. With one foot he groped for the closest chair and kicked it over.

"Hands in the air!" Tires squealing, pelting the front of the building with gravel; another gunshot.

The other chair was too far to reach. Q braced his foot against the table leg and shoved, scraping it across the concrete with a shuddering sound that _had_ to be audible above – and his reward was a door opening and almost-imperceptible footsteps on the stairs.

Only when the footsteps paused right outside his room did Q consider that it might not be a reward after all.

He rolled over, got his knees and his good arm beneath him. His limbs shook and his neck protested at the weight of his head, and pain was only the firing of certain neurons in the brain, why should it be so cloaked in emotions, such a strong competitor to willpower?

The door opened, and his focus found purchase on the barrel of a gun.

Double-oh-seven in his earpiece, saying, "I've got him."

Got who?

"Q."

The man with the gun came a few steps closer, and relief gave Q's limbs permission to collapse.

"Double-oh-seven."

Bond felt his pulse, turned his chin to examine his face. With effort Q raised his head to look towards the far wall, and Bond automatically pointed his gun – but there was nothing there, just a blank stretch of concrete and a clock.

"Thirty-seven minutes," Q said with a sigh, and let his head rest. "You're late."


	11. Stitches at the safe house

**Eleven. Stitches at the safe house.**

"What's going on in there?" Holly asked. "How is he?"

"Bleeding, but conscious and snarking," Bond said, letting a tiny dose of exasperation seep in for Q's benefit. The kid's left arm was a bloody mess from elbow to knuckles, his face and throat badly bruised, but no sign of gunshot wounds or broken bones. "Can you stand?"

"…Probably."

Q reached out with his uninjured arm, gripped the edge of the table, and hauled himself up to sitting. Bond, impatient, seized his upper arm and lifted him to his feet.

"Computer." Q was turning his head stiffly, eyes sliding like an improperly tracking cursor. "He took the computer."

Bond didn't have time to care because Holly was talking again in his ear: "There's an MI6 safehouse on the corner of Dalton Street and Helmwood Avenue, address 57 Helmwood. Take him there. He knows the code to get in."

"The target's getting away."

"Leave him. Gorman has Dwyer, Vickers is in pursuit of the other one."

Bond hesitated.

"_Leave him_." This time it was M. "Your priority is recovery."

"What are they saying?" Q asked, and it was the choked quality of his voice, the pain thick on his tongue, that convinced Bond.

"I'm taking you to a safehouse," he said, and steered Q up the stairs.

In the alley Gorman was standing over a kneeling Dwyer, gun pointed at the back of his head, feeling through the pockets of his vest with one hand. At the sight of Q's bloodstains, he said, "Take the car, I've got backup on the way."

Bond caught the keys Gorman tossed him, unlocked the back door, and bundled Q inside. "Lie down on the seat. I don't want you to be seen."

The address took him three miles away from Heathrow, to a shuttered computer store on a street of quaint brick two-story shops. As they slowed, Q raised his head to the window and let out a little cough of laughter.

"What?"

Q read off the name mounted in molded letters above the door – "Consolidated Internet Security" – and chuckled again.

"I'm missing something."

But all Q said was, "Pull around to the back and park by the bins."

Bond pulled up near an unmarked door with a keypad below the handle and opened the car for Q, who clambered out unsteadily.

"What's the code?"

Q shook his head and punched in the numbers himself. He was swaying as though standing on the deck of a ship. Blood blotched the back of his shirt in four places.

The door opened to reveal a narrow staircase, and Q sighed in a manner with which Bond was intimately familiar, the sigh of a man in pain confronted with one more small exertion, concerned that this would be the one that finally collapsed him. Bond gripped his arm again and they navigated the stairs in silence.

At the top Q entered another password to unlock a tiny open-plan flat, windows covered with heavy blinds, double bed separated from the living area by a folding partition.

"First aid kit's under the washroom sink," Q said hoarsely, and Bond left him to retrieve it. When he returned Q had disappeared from the living room, and Bond automatically placed a hand on his gun – but a quick glance around the partition revealed Q curled on top of the comforter, eyes closed, glasses folded on the spare pillow.

"Stay awake," Bond ordered.

"Couldn't sleep if I wanted to," Q mumbled, without moving or looking.

"Take these." Bond held out a foil packet of painkillers and a paper cup of water. Q sat up, with obvious reluctance, and as he ripped the packet with his teeth and tossed down the pills Bond took inventory of his injuries. Lip split and face bruised, mostly on the left side, meaning he had been beaten by someone right-handed. Blood on his back, from some kind of blunt force – the tears in his shirt were not consistent with a knife. The chain curled like a snake on the basement floor had been around his neck, judging from the marks deepening from red to purple below his jaw. Two wounds had old bandages, one at his right temple and the other on the back of his neck, just visible over his shirt collar – probably where the microchip had been. And – most worrisome – the arm.

Bond shrugged out of his suit jacket, hands automatically laying out gauze, dampening a washcloth with disinfectant. Q flopped back on the bed and didn't resist when Bond lifted and straightened the wounded arm, though Bond saw his neck tense and his eyelids twitch. As he blotted some of the blood away, the pattern of the scabbing cuts revealed itself, and Bond's lips curled in a snarl.

_Property of MI6._

"He thinks he's clever," Q muttered, cracking one eye. "But there's a great deal worse damage he could have done. He knows my real name, he could have put _that_ on my arm – give M a coronary trying to get that sorted."

Bond began to wind the bandage. "Tell me what we're dealing with."

The eye closed. Q breathed deeply and slowly through his nose. He spoke as though reciting an old lesson, repeated so often it was meaningless. "His name is Colin Burns. He was my flatmate for two years when we were both at Cambridge. He works for Barclays now and he needed my help bypassing some of their internal security software so he could install a penny slicing scheme and retire early to Aruba. He had figured out I work for MI6, but he wasn't interested in any of the fascinating and dangerous information I've got memorized, like the password to the MI6 servers, or the identities and current assignments of our field agents, or the chemical composition of certain explosives Q branch is making that can be taken through airport security. Either he neglected to consider that any one of those pieces of information would get him more money from the right buyer in one day than his penny slicing would in a week, or he did consider it and realized that he lacks the spine to create contacts with volatile international criminals. I don't gamble, but if I did I would put money on the latter."

Bond chuckled. "You know, I'm starting to understand why M considers you dangerous."

Q folded his bandaged arm against his chest with a little wince. "You don't know the half of it."

For a moment Bond hesitated, but he saw no prudence in keeping this particular secret. "M told me about you."

Q's eyes snapped open and darted to Bond's face. Bond wasn't sure what he had been expecting, but it wasn't what he got: calculation and wariness, but no anger or betrayal. No fear.

"About my university extracurriculars?"

"I was impressed. Five million pounds and a job with the Secret Intelligence Service. Not bad for a righteous, entitled uni brat."

Q made a noise somewhere between a laugh and a scoff. "I didn't get to _keep_ that money. In fact, it was a long time before I was allowed complete control over my bank account again."

"Turn your head." Bond peeled off the old bandage above Q's ear and dabbed disinfectant on the wound; it had already begun to close. "Was Colin Burns involved in your extracurriculars?"

"We were in the securities fraud together, for a little while. When I started hacking government servers he wanted me to take things that could be used for extortion. That was never my intention; my goal was always to release as much as I could to the public. At the time I believed that we lived in a nominal democracy and the government should pay more than lip service to that fact."

"And what do you believe now?" Bond asked, applying a thin line of sealing ointment to a cut at the corner of Q's jaw.

It took Q a long time to answer. His eyes had closed again, and for a moment Bond thought he had fallen into a stupor, though his shoulders were much too tense for him to be asleep. Finally, with a sigh, he said, "That there are some things people are better off not knowing about the way the world is run."

Bond let that sit for a moment, busying himself with the cutting of bandages and medical tape. "Shirt off, I need to look at your back."

Q picked at the buttons with his good hand, but his fingers were clumsy and finally Bond did it for him, unknotted his tie and slid it through his collar. Q rolled onto his stomach, turning his head restlessly from side to side, unable to decide which injury – bruises and swelling on the left or head wound on the right – should bear the weight. He compromised by curling his good arm under his chin.

The blood had stuck Q's undershirt to his back. He sucked in a long breath through his teeth as Bond peeled it away. Beneath: lines of welts from his shoulders to the small of his back, most already hard and bruising, the skin broken some places in thin slashes.

"What was this, a riding crop?"

Q snorted. "Very good, 007. I can only wonder how you obtained such powers of recognition."

"Like you said – some things are better off unknown." Bond gently probed each of the cuts. "This one needs stitches."

"Lovely."

For some time Bond worked in silence, cleaning and patching and stitching and building a surprising respect for the way the kid handled the pain, with only the occasional jerk or bitten-off sound. The in-ear link to MI6 was still active, and he could hear sporadic mutterings in the background, as though M and Holly had removed their earpieces without muting them. He wondered if they had been listening, what they were discussing, and – most concerning – why he couldn't be involved.

"So just how badly did things end at Cambridge between you and your flatmate?"

Q jolted as though the question carried an electric current; Bond hastily pulled away to avoid stabbing him with the needle. He swung his head around to scrutinize Bond through narrowed eyes, scan his face for any withheld knowledge, and this time the wariness did have an undercurrent of anger.

Finally he said, with a warning in his voice, "That's irrelevant."

"Don't give me that," Bond snapped. It wasn't the anger or the order that had riled him, but the idea that the kid might be protecting his uni flatmate even now, with the other man's hatred carved into his arm. "If I wanted a favor from an old partner in crime, first I'd ask nicely. Then, if they refused and I was really desperate, I'd go for blackmail – very persuasive, but very little effort on my part. If that didn't work, I'd threaten violence, maybe demonstrate a little – carve up your cat, or something along those lines, make you feel unsafe in your own home. _Then_ I'd get to torture. Your _old friend _seems to have skipped a few of those steps."

Q had deflated, dropped his head back on the pillow, drifted his eyes closed. "He did ask, though he didn't exactly say 'please.'"

Quietly Bond said, "He watched, didn't he?"

"He participated."

"And he didn't shed any tears."

Q muttered, "I don't think Colin has ever shed any tears over anyone." Creases had formed between his eyebrows and below his eyes and Bond knew they had nothing to do with physical pain. He took a deep breath, and when he let it out words came with it, as quiet and quick as escaping prisoners. "I think I… realized that he was a sadist not long after we met each other, but for every quality I found distasteful, there was another I admired in equal measure. He seemed ambitious; he had connections all around campus; he could tell the professors to their faces, in front of their classes, that they were wrong, and he would get away with it. I could talk to him on an intellectual level that I'd never achieved with any of my peers before, and he seemed to find the things I said genuinely interesting. He lured me in very quickly."

Bond returned to stitching, watching Q's face out of the corner of his eye but careful not to look at it outright, careful not to do anything to interrupt.

"Eventually we started manipulating stocks together, like I said. We would buy certain stocks for a very low value, disseminate misleading information about their worth online, and sell for a profit before the bubble burst and the value crashed. I don't remember if it was his idea or mine, but I do remember that he swore it would be our secret, and I was stupid enough to be flattered that he would choose me, out of all the worthy friends he had, to be his sole partner and confidant.

"At the start of second year we got a flat. Colin's father worked – still works – for Barclays, and Colin bragged to me about how over the summer he had used some of his father's personal information to hack people's bank accounts and steal a hundred and fifty thousand pounds. It was bait, I suppose, a test, and I took it. I got into Barclays and I doubled what he had stolen. I expected him to be pleased with me; instead he gave me the cold shoulder for days. That was the first time I realized that our friendship had always been founded on competition, and that any time I outdid him, he would make me pay for it.

"I withdrew, a little bit. I had gotten involved in a certain brand of internet activism, as I told you – 'information wants to be free,' that type of thing. Colin would mock me for it. He couldn't understand why I would spend so much time hacking for no material gain. We had several terrible rows. We both started spending our time either out on campus or holed up in our rooms so we wouldn't have to see each other, but we were each far too stubborn to give up the flat."

Bond snorted in warm recognition. Strict focus, stubbornness, stonewalling a problem with computers – of course. Q seemed to understand, because the corner of his mouth quirked in a painful little smile, gone as quickly as it appeared, replaced by a trembling that bled into his words.

"The sad part is that as much as I hated him during that time, I was also desperate for him to forgive me. Most of the time it was a selfish feeling – I wanted him to recognize the superiority of my way of thinking and show me some respect going forward. But sometimes I had awful moments where I would have sworn off everything, everything I was good at and believed in, just to have a friend that close again."

Silence. Bond's hands had stilled, the stitches unfinished. Q's eyes remained closed, but they moved back and forth behind his eyelids like a hand rippling window blinds. It took him a minute to marshal, but when he did his voice was remarkably steady.

"Then I broke the encryption on a terrorist cell I'd been tracking for a while. And I realized that for the first time, there was absolutely nothing I could do about the information I'd gained. If I posted it publicly, the militants would simply disappear into the hills before any sort of military force could organize to catch them. I had gained access to Interpol some time before, and after a great deal of thought I decided to send the decryption code directly to them.

"I told Colin what I had done. I have no idea why I bothered. Maybe I was still looking for his approval in some way. He raged at me. He was afraid that by contacting Interpol directly I had somehow exposed us, that they would open an investigation into whoever had sent them the code and connect the dots on all of our shared criminal activities. I called him selfish; he called me self-destructive. At one point I said that I didn't understand him anymore, that we never used to let our disagreements get in the way of our friendship, and he looked at me straight and said, 'Well, it's not my fault you stopped being interesting.'

"And I don't know – maybe it was the look in his eye, or… but that was when I realized what I had meant to him the entire time."

His voice faded out and he was silent for so long that Bond decided to risk a prompt. "Which was?"

Q's mouth parted; the tip of his tongue touched the tear in his lip. He swallowed, twice. When he finally spoke his voice was terribly empty.

"Absolutely nothing. A diversion. Amusement. I suppose I was _useful_ – much as he tried to deny it, I _was_ better than him at certain aspects of programming. I realized that I had given him so much of myself, and I still couldn't trust anything he had told me.

"He left me alone in the flat. I didn't see him for two days. Then he showed up with a group of our mutual friends and told me he was leaving. They moved out his things and he was gone."

There was more; now that he knew the nature of the faults, Bond could feel the undiscovered ones even if he couldn't see their exact shape. But he played dumb, laid the line, because if Q didn't say it now he never would. "And you didn't see him again until today."

Q's face had slackened, focus gone – but then he gave his head a little shake and said, "No, that's not the end." He cleared his throat and his voice came back a little stronger. "You see, when he disappeared for those two days, he left his computer in the flat with me."

Comprehension cracked Bond's face into a tiny smile. "And what exactly did you do with the wealth of personal information you extracted from that computer?"

"I only took the things he cared about the most, the things he had under the heaviest encryption: his banking passwords. He had amassed a great deal of money through the fraud I helped him perpetrate, and when I found out he was leaving I confiscated it, all of it."

"And he confronted you."

"It took him less than a day. He showed up at the flat and screamed at me through the door. I told him that if he took me to court like he was threatening to do, I would gladly hand over everything I had on him to the prosecutors. He enumerated, in detail, all of the nasty things he would like to do to me. One of my neighbors called the police, and when they arrived, he fled. I waited for a long time for him to try revenge, but aside from a few unavoidable university events where we didn't speak to each other, we didn't have any further contact – though I did have a couple of unfortunate encounters with friends who believed his version of the story."

"So today wasn't really about Barclays."

Q said, "Of course not," but there was no scolding in his tone, just a sad finality.

This time the silence that settled around them was gentler – some of the weight had been taken on by a spare set of shoulders, and no judgment had crept in to take its place.

Then Q started, and he turned his head just enough to see Bond out of the corner of his eye. "So you didn't get Colin."

"I don't know." Bond felt an unaccustomed need to apologize. "We got Dwyer. My assignment was to extract you."

Q turned his face away again. "Hmmm."

Bond had no idea what emotion that noise was supposed to convey, but as he tied off the stitches he could practically feel the adrenaline of an idea vibrating through the kid's nerves.

"All right," he said, wiping the blood from the needle and his hands, "I think we're done. I'm not going to try to fix your lip, that needs a professional. Just stay still for a while –"

And _of course_ as those words left his mouth, Q sat up, glasses already in place. Bond put out a hand to catch Q's chest if he tried to leave the bed, but then Q looked at him and something in those eyes stopped Bond flat. "Give me your mobile."

"Why?"

Q's eyebrows went up as though this disobedience actually surprised him.

Bond repeated, "Why?" but Q had found the suit jacket lying on the floor, and he swooped for it – Bond realized a hair too late and stomped on the sleeve, but Q's hands found the phone in the inner pocket and he retreated across the bed out of Bond's reach, slid off the far side and began to type.

"_Q_," Bond said, in a voice only a step or two removed from his most dangerous. "What –"

"I –" Q spared him the smallest glance, the dismissive flick of the eyes he gave when decorum demanded acknowledgement but all he could see was the idea. "– am arranging a meeting between you and Colin Burns."

He tapped a final button and tossed the phone onto the bed. Bond picked it up and looked at the last outgoing message – sent to an unknown number, an address he recognized.

"Absolutely not," Bond said, but Q was pacing around the end of the bed, picking up his bloody clothes and putting them back on, talking under his breath, animated against the pain by his plan.

"I've invaded his intimate life, I've made it unsafe – he can't walk into his flat or use his own mobile without fear. So now he knows where I live and he'll love the idea of being a danger to me in my own home. He won't be able to resist it. He must know he'll be walking into a trap, but he'll come anyway. He'll think it's worth it if he can make me squirm one more time –"

_And I'm to be the bait?_

Bond stepped in front of him and seized him by the shoulder. "I did not save your life just so you can immediately turn round and put it back in danger."

Frustration turned Q's gaze away, eyes skittering without seeing over the thick blinds and the yawning washroom doorway and the bloody washcloths on the bed. When he looked back Bond realized why he had kept his eyes closed during the telling of his story – not from the pain and not for his focus, but to shutter the emotions he didn't want read, the anger and the hurt, the loathing directed at Colin and at himself.

The certainty of power sharpened Q's voice. "Do you want to get him? Because I can give him to you, in under three hours."

Bond matched him steadily. "I think _you_ want to get him, and _you_ want to give him to me in under three hours."

"And _you_, of all people, will understand."

And Bond knew two things at once: first, the ease with which he could drag Q back to headquarters, with his body too weak to enforce his will; and second, the speed with which he would consent to Q's reckless plan, because in the end they wanted the same thing, and because this boy's eyes could burn.


	12. The final confrontation

**Twelve. The final confrontation.**

As soon as they walked in the door, Q said, "You've been in my flat."

The observation startled Bond enough that he abandoned his security scan to stare at Q, if only for a moment. "What detail did I miss?"

"You knew that I have a cat."

"I could have been saying that hypothetically."

"And I expected you to go straight for the voices coming from the bedroom."

Now that he expected its presence, Bond had whited out the sound of _Crime and Punishment_ the same way he would falling rain or cars on a crowded street. But it was still there, the murmur of a man plotting in another room.

"_He did not know where he was going and did not think about it. This much he knew: he had to put an end to all that, today, right away, once and for all, otherwise he could not return home, because he did not want to live like that."_

"It's a nice touch," Bond granted.

Q nodded. "I've been working my way through the classics. All the books people should have read but probably didn't. Hopefully the security team finds it illuminating – at least more so than my personal life."

"I wasn't aware you had a personal life," Bond teased, moving through the flat, shouldering open doors and nudging his gun into corners like a police dog sniffing for contraband.

Q said, "Exactly." Bond could hear him banging cabinets open and closed in the kitchen, rustling through paper packets, clattering the kettle against the stove top. When he opened the door to the computer room, the cat shot out over his feet and disappeared around the corner, towards the light and noise and Q.

The flat was clean. In the bedroom Bond peered through the blinds at the cars parked below and wondered if Colin Burns would be smart enough to change vehicles. A white sedan turned onto the street, slowed briefly in front of the building, then drove on; Bond eyed the license, but it pulled into a driveway at the other end of the block, and a young couple got out and unloaded an infant strapped in a carrier.

"Double-oh-seven." Holly's voice in his ear. "You've been stopped for almost fifteen minutes – everything all right?"

"Fine. We're getting him a change of clothes."

"Well, move your arses, 'cause I won't be able to sit down till we've got you both back safe."

"Do us one favor."

"What?" She sounded suspicious. Bond's estimation of her increased, again.

"Send us a couple of medics and another agent in a second car. Burns is still at large, and I have a feeling we'll need them."

A sharp silence. The faint static hiss of Holly's breathing was all that kept Bond from assuming the line had gone dead.

Then she said, in a low, controlled voice much more frightening than a yell, "This was _his_ idea, wasn't it? If he's trying for martyrdom, tell him to come back here and I will _cheerfully_ kill him myself."

Bond had been around long enough to know when to put himself in the middle and when to duck out. "We'll be back within the hour."

At that she did start to yell, and as Bond pulled the earpiece away he could hear her from an impressive distance: "_Oh_ no, do _not_ hang up on me, I want to talk to him –"

Q was standing in the doorway with eyebrows raised.

"Backup boys'll be here in twenty," Bond explained, setting the earpiece on top of the CD changer, "and Holly Mason might have your head when we get back."

Q sighed. "I was hoping she'd wait. There'll be nothing left of me for M to chew over."

"You'd rather M went first?"

"Well..." Q rummaged through the closet, emerged with a clean shirt and a soft gray sweater. "It's like choosing between the headmaster and your mother."

Bond smiled grimly and said, "I wouldn't know," and there was a little flash of sadness in Q's eyes like light glinting off gold.

The kettle whistled and Bond accepted this excuse. It was several minutes before Q joined him, freshly dressed, hair damp in patches where he had washed out the crusted blood. He sat down, stiffly, and slumped his shoulders against the table, arms limp in his lap and chin resting on the varnished surface. His eyes peered up at Bond through his fringe.

"Thanks for the cup of tea you didn't make me."

"You're welcome."

The cat had made itself a centerpiece, paws curled beneath its body and tail lashing back and forth as though it had independent intentions. Bond stretched a hand towards it and was batted back by a paw. Q smirked and stroked the cat with his good hand, apparently just to prove that he could; the fickle creature nuzzled his fingers and rumbled contentedly.

"What's her name?"

"His. Schrodinger."

"Schroeder?"

"_Schrodinger_. Schrodinger's Cat is a thought experiment in quantum mechanics designed to make you consider when exactly quantum superposition shifts into the reality we see –"

Bond held up a hand in surrender. "All right, so it's a boffin joke."

Q had a look as though Schrodinger the cat had just dragged in something unpleasant from outside, but he conceded, "I suppose you could say that."

Bond knocked back the rest of his tea and checked the clip of his gun, took experimental aim at the front door, which he had a straight shot at from the kitchen table. Q seemed to be conserving his energy, sitting still as a statue except for the subtle rise and fall of his ribs and the sweep of his eyelashes. He was staring so intently at the door to the broom cupboard that Bond looked round twice to make sure there wasn't anything there he was supposed to be seeing.

Q's eyes darted to Bond, over and away, three times.

"Spit it out," Bond said.

Q half-smiled, half-grimaced, and Bond knew he had taken him by surprise. His eyebrows tightened as though he were puzzling over his next words.

Finally he said, "M told you that I used to steal from the Secret Intelligence Service."

"Yes."

"I exposed the identities of multiple field agents."

"…Yes."

Q's voice was too light, too composed. "In essence I'm not much different from our friend Mr. Silva."

"Q –"

"But you came for me anyway." He turned his head just a little and watched Bond patiently, as if he expected an explanation.

Bond had never thought he would have to give one. The silence seemed a fragile but suffocating thing, like a plastic film – easily destroyed, but still thick enough to choke a man.

"I don't know exactly what you did," Bond said slowly, "but M decided that the good outweighed the bad, and that's enough for me."

Comfort was not Bond's strong suit, and inscrutability was Q's; his forehead remained tense and the focus of his eyes altered as though he were again seeing something Bond could not. Each blink shaded with a different emotion, gratitude-confusion-sadness-guilt – here again the fault lines, the cracks Q had strengthened but could not repair, and he was teetering on the edge of one, a question and a fear rising like groundswell in his eyes –

Then, at the bottom of the staircase just outside the flat, a door slammed. Bond drew his gun and cradled it in his lap; Q turned his chair to face the front door with a scraping sound that sent Schrodinger shooting from the table like cannonball.

Footsteps on the stairs, fast and loud and careless, and then the door burst open and Colin Burns took two steps into the flat before freezing with one hand still on the doorknob and a sheepish grin on his face. His manner was so breezy that an outsider might think he had stumbled on the scene by accident, if not for the blood dried crackling on his wrists and cuffs, on his trousers where he had wiped his hands.

"Put your hands where I can see them," Bond growled.

Colin raised his arms obediently and ran his eyes over the mismatched furniture, over Bond and his cocked gun, over Q with his bruised face and bandaged arm and blank eyes. His grin morphed like an optical illusion, awkward innocuousness melting into malice.

"Only one hired gun?" he said to Q. "I'm a little disappointed."

Q's jaw tightened, but he did not speak. Bond rose from his chair and stepped over the living-room threshold, gun trained at the heart.

"Of course, 'a little disappointed' could describe my feelings about our entire reunion," Colin continued without concern. "I gave you more than an hour with my personal computer and all you managed to do was dox me."

"One juvenile revenge fantasy for another," Q muttered.

Colin's smirk wavered, but only for a second. He glanced curiously at Bond.

"Did you see how I marked him? I made him an honest man for once. I was thinking about putting 'thief' on the other arm – he likes to steal, did you know that?"

"I hear you like to steal too," Bond said, closing the gap between them step by step.

Colin shrugged, bit his lower lip in a parody of embarrassment. "Guilty as charged. And I suppose I _will_ be charged now –" With a cock of the head at Q: "Are you going to testify against me? They do allow indentured servants to speak in court now, don't they?"

All color had fled Q's face, but his eyes were dark and dangerous. "You're assuming they'll even grant you a tri–"

But then Bond stepped directly in front of the television, and the damn thing lit up with a "Good evening," startled him enough that he looked away for a fraction of a second – and in that hair's-breadth of a moment Q dove for the remote on the coffee table, and Colin lunged for Q. They collided and scuffled, both still on their feet – Bond swung round and aimed again, but the dying light from the window glinted off the gun pressed to the side of Q's head.

Q sighed. "This has become extremely melodramatic, even by your standards, Colin."

Colin's free hand pressed down on Q's collarbone, held him back as a shield against Colin's chest. "Well, the stakes _have_ always been high between us," he said, right by Q's ear. Q flinched, but Colin caught his chin and held it. "Trust among thieves is a funny thing – it's always conditional. I didn't expect MI6 to send as much firepower as they did. I thought they'd see this as an… opportunity. To rid themselves of a liability."

Bond made a scathing sound in the back of his throat. "You're fucking around with things you don't understand."

The door below opened again, and Bond heard the rustle of clothes restricted by a bulletproof vest. He hazarded one step sideways so he could glance down the stairs, make eye contact with the field agent drawing her gun, shake his head in warning; she nodded and stood down.

"Don't tell me you've never sold anyone out before." Colin's whole face was alight with a playful cruelty. "That's how the world works, especially in your profession. Take what's useful and then leave them behind."

The glare from the telly turned Q's glasses into little screens, whited out his eyes. "Take the bloody shot, Bond."

"Oh, look at _you_," Colin purred. "Giving _orders_."

"Think very carefully about what you're doing," Bond said, to both of them.

"I have," Q told him quietly. His glasses slipped a little, and over the frames his eyes were strained but serious.

And Bond felt anger strong enough to make his gun hand quiver, that this arrogant child with his insulated existence could possibly threaten the core of MI6, that Q would even consider himself a fair trade for this lowlife. "There's always another option," he said firmly, meaningfully, for Q.

Q stared. Then he nodded, half to Bond and half to himself. His gaze skimmed the couch, the coffee table, the carpet as though he were looking for something.

Colin clucked his tongue. "Apparently even MI6 is full of compassionate fools these days."

"Are you saying death isn't compassionate?" Q edged his foot under the table, touched something small and spherical with his toes – a little silver ball, a cat toy. "It might be a mercy, for you."

And he kicked the ball sideways past Colin's shoes, and at the little jangling sound Schrodinger sprang from beneath the couch, leapt over their feet in a furious gray blur, and Colin's head turned, the gun tilted barely away from Q's temple – Bond recognized what Q did next as an MI6 self-defense maneuver, feet planted, upper-body twist, elbows in the right places, and Colin hit the floor on his back, scrambled to sitting – and froze as Q released the safety on the gun.

Q was panting from the pain this had cost him, skin stretched tight and translucent over his cheekbones, sweat curling the hair around his ears. His lips drew back in an animal grimace and there was something feral and frightening in his eyes. His shoulders shook, but his hands held steady.

For a moment Colin's eyes betrayed a fear he had never shown to Bond – but then he bared all his teeth.

"Go ahead," he hissed. "Shoot. Make 'murderer' a line on your resume."

A beat, and Q's eyes rounded with understanding in a way that made him look innocent despite the gun. "I see. No matter what happens now, you win. If I shoot, then you die a martyr, knowing that you goaded me into committing a crime you never did. But if I don't shoot, then you can tell yourself it was because I didn't have the fortitude to finish off my torturer, that I'm soft, or still sentimental about you in some way."

Colin's sneer widened. "Good boy," he said, "Very clever," and a stab of rage twitched Bond's finger against the trigger.

Q breathed deeply, in and out. His eyebrows had dropped into the frown that meant he was focusing on a surprisingly difficult problem. Then his tongue darted out to wet his lower lip and Bond knew that he had settled on a solution.

His eyes hardened and his spine straightened and his grip tightened on the gun. He looked at Colin straight.

"You've always been a bastard, Colin."

And he turned the gun over in his hands and swung it into the side of Colin's head, hard enough to stun Colin sideways, drop him in a daze right at Bond's feet.

Bond stepped one foot over him, gun pointed between his shoulders, and nodded down the stairs at the backup agent poised on the bottom step. Colin turned his head at the sound of her approach, blood streaking his pale hair and tracing the corner of his jaw. He seemed too shellshocked to struggle. With difficulty he turned his head back and focused his eyes on Q.

Q crouched in front of Colin with the gun dangling loosely between his knees. "Would you like to know what I did with the three million I stole from you?"

Colin growled something just intelligible enough to register as profane.

Q held his gaze calmly. "I kept about forty thousand. The rest I divided into varying chunks and donated anonymously to charity. UNICEF. Comic Relief. Oxfam. I think there were six or seven of them altogether. Redistribution of wealth, from the morally bankrupt to the truly needy."

A snarl contorted Colin's face, exposing the creature beneath – but for once he had no words.

The female agent made quick work of the handcuffs, hauled Colin to his feet, and manhandled him, staggering, out of the flat and down the stairs. Bond stepped out on the landing and watched through the front-door window as she shoved Colin's bloody head down into the backseat of the waiting car.

The floor creaked behind Bond as Q stood up. Then he said, "Oh," very softly, and the gun hit the carpet with a thump, and Bond turned just in time to see his legs fold and his eyes lose their focus and his hand fly out too late to catch the steadying furniture.

Three strides and Bond knelt beside him. "All right?"

"Yes," Q mumbled, eyes shut. "Just… more painkillers and a glass of water and sleep, lots of sleep, like two weeks of sleep."

A smile twitched Bond's face despite his best efforts, and he rolled his eyes at himself. Clearly he was becoming sentimental in his old age, if the MI6 alphabet had this effect on him. "You could have shot him somewhere non-lethal. The shoulder or the leg. I would have covered for you."

Q shook his head, making himself wince. "I couldn't have done that."

"Don't tell me you can't fire a bloody gun."

The kid's prone position couldn't mitigate his offended glare. "Do you honestly believe I'd send agents into the field with something I didn't know how to operate?"

Bond conceded the point with a little nod and Q, satisfied, closed his eyes again.

"At such close range," he murmured, "the bullet would have passed through Colin, through the wall behind him, and into the flat on the other side, which is occupied by a single mother and her two children. Too much risk." His voice had dropped so far that Bond had to lean in to hear. "Besides, I'm content with him sitting in a prison cell for many years, on a shorter leash than I."

Medical swarmed the door and Bond waved them inside. "Speaking of leashes, I doubt M will allow you into the field again anytime soon."

"I'm strangely at peace with that." Then Q's eyes shot open and he sat up so suddenly that he almost knocked over one of the medics at his side. "Wait – the robot. For the rigged counterfeiting boxes. Did it work? Has anyone tried it yet?"

And Bond laughed, actually _laughed_ from somewhere deep in his chest for the first time in an age, and Q only looked wounded for a second or two before he gave in and fell back into the medics' hands with the germ of a smile on his face.

* * *

It was a week before Bond saw Q again, and then only by accident. When he announced his return from a four-day assignment in Austria in his usual fashion – breezing past Moneypenny's conveniently empty desk and barging straight into M's office – he found himself on the receiving end of a pair of startled looks that shifted into annoyance on Mallory's part and resignation on Q's. In the corner, Tanner's shoulders slumped as though he had just sighed silently.

"Charming reception." Shame was not usually part of Bond's emotional vocabulary, but he could see from the set of Q's mouth what they had been discussing, and he had spent enough time wondering if Q regretted where he placed his confidences. "I'll show myself out."

"Never mind, we're about finished here," Mallory said, glancing over for Q's affirmation and getting a nod. He held out a manila folder. "Mr. Burns' trial date is set for June first. Rest assured we do not plan to make any deals with _him_."

"He'd be a security nightmare," Q said, perfectly composed. "I suspect his name and photograph are known on all seven continents and the International Space Station by now. My staff might quit in protest if they had to erase him."

M indulged in a smile.

Bond stepped aside so Q could open the door – but Q paused, turned around, faced M again.

"You sold some of my programs to Barclays."

Mallory's forehead wrinkled with surprise, but he met Q's gaze evenly. "Yes. We've made money off of certain products on the public market for years –"

"How much?"

A pause. Mallory glanced at Tanner, who shrugged. "I… don't know the exact figure, but… about ten million."

Q considered, then gave a small self-satisfied nod. The faintest defiance armored his voice as he said, "I like to keep a tally of how much I'm worth to MI6. Sir."

And then he was gone. Bond basked in Mallory's raised eyebrows for a moment before glancing after Q and catching only a flash of color as he rounded the corner out of Moneypenny's office.

Q walked faster and had longer legs than Bond, but he hadn't spent a significant portion of his life involved in foot chases. Bond caught up to him halfway down the hall; Q acknowledged his presence by slowing down to match Bond's natural pace.

"How are you holding up?" Bond asked. The bruises had faded to unswollen yellow stains and he moved as though unhampered by pain, but he was wearing his arm in a sling, bandages peeking out from his cardigan sleeve.

"I should be asking you that. Aren't you just back from official business?"

"It was fairly routine, for a top-secret mission. I only fired my gun once, when I was putting a bullet through the target's head."

"Does that mean you actually brought your equipment back in one piece?"

"No. I threw it in the river. Didn't want you to get spoiled."

They kept walking, side-by-side.

Bond muttered, "Holly Mason sent me flowers."

Somehow he knew that Q had just barely conquered the urge to roll his eyes. "Did you remind her that you were just doing your job?"

"It was a little bit more than that."

They reached the lifts. Q called one to take him downstairs, to his computers and his guns and his staff, to the department he had been handed at such a young age by the people who should most mistrust him, and Bond thought that Colin Burns had been completely wrong, that this man had never and would never be owned by MI6, or by anyone.

Q was carefully looking everywhere else. "I never said thank you, so –" His eyes slid sideways to meet Bond's, but then he seemed to decide that that wasn't good enough and turned to face Bond full on. "Thank you, 007."

The ping of the arriving lift made Q – not _jump_, he wasn't flighty – but definitely _twitch_. Bond didn't bother to hide his smile.

"Does expressing gratitude always make you this anxious?"

Q put one foot on the lift floor to hold it. His gaze traced the pattern on the carpet. "I find myself humbled lately, and considering the things I have to be grateful for."

"All your secrets are safe with me," Bond promised.

Q looked up with a little light of mischief. He stepped into the lift and pressed a button, all insecurity dowsed like a candle flame. "Double-oh-seven, what makes you think you know all my secrets? Wouldn't want you to get spoiled."

The door slid closed on his grin.

Bond shook his head in wonder, staring at his own half-smile reflected in the lift doors. He allowed himself a long moment before he turned around to head back to M's office, hands in his trouser pockets and an echo of Q's grin still playing about his face. Always the last word, his Quartermaster – for now.

* * *

**Author's notes:**

The _Crime and Punishment_ quote is from Part Two, chapter six.

_"All right, so it's a boffin joke."_

Because no one explained this to me when I first started reading Brit fic and it took me an embarrassingly long time to figure it out - a boffin is someone who knows a great deal about a specialized field of science. Sometimes used disparagingly the way Americans use "nerd." Q is pretty much a boffin stereotype.

_"I gave you more than an hour with my personal computer and all you managed to do was dox me."_

Doxing, or d0xing, is hacker slang for releasing someone's personally identifiable information to the public online.

And thus we have reached the end. Much like Q, I think gratitude is in order.

INSPIRATIONS THAT DROVE THIS FIC:

- _Wired_ magazine provides great insight into Q's tech world for someone like me who has only started to learn the full potential of computers and tech-geek culture. I based Q's hacker past partially on Wikileaks and partially on an article about the collectivist hacker organization Anonymous that ran in print in _Wired_'s July 2012 issue.

- Joss Whedon discussing the writing process of _The Avengers_: "They're gonna talk for like ten pages, is that okay?"

- I finished reading Tana French's psychological thriller _In the Woods_ not long before I started working on this fic, and fans of the novel might see its influence. The chapter where Cassie tells Ryan about her experience befriending a psychopath at uni certainly informed the character of Colin Burns.

- Canon Q is such a big question mark that I necessarily drew from texts other than _Skyfall_ to give him more color. Probably my biggest influences are Raskolnikov (protagonist of_ Crime and Punishment_), Frank Abagnale (as seen in _Catch Me if You Can_), and Jesse Eisenberg and Andrew Garfield's performances in _The Social Network_.

- And also, ALL OF YOU LOVELY PEOPLE who contribute to fandom! Gen fic is pretty rare in this corner of the fan world, so I appreciate everyone who took a chance on something outside their normal reading habits. I hope I made it worth your while.


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